WebUI Zig

WebUI is not a web-server solution or a framework, but it allows you to use any web browser as a GUI, with your preferred language in the backend and HTML5 in the frontend. All in a lightweight portable lib.

Features

• Parent library written in pure C
• Lightweight ~200 Kb & Small memory footprint
• Fast binary communication protocol between WebUI and the browser (Instead of JSON)
• Multi-platform & Multi-Browser
• Using private profile for safety

API Document

Online Document: https://webui-dev.github.io/zig-webui/

Examples

There are several examples for newbies, they are in the examples directory.

You can use zig build --help to view all buildable examples.

Like zig build run_minimal, this will build and run the minimal example.

Installation

Zig 0.11

1. Add this to build.zig.zon

.@"zig-webui" = .{
        // It is recommended to replace the following branch with commit id
        .url = "https://github.com/webui-dev/zig-webui/archive/main.tar.gz",
        .hash = <hash value>,
    },

This tells zig to fetch zig-webui from a tarball provided by GitHub. Make sure to replace the COMMIT part with an actual commit SHA in long form, like 219faa2a5cd5a268a865a1100e92805df4b84610. Every time you want to update zig-webui you'll have to update this commit.

2. Config build.zig

Add this:

const zig_webui = b.dependency("zig-webui", .{
    .target = target,
    .optimize = optimize,
    .enable_tls = false, // whether enable tls support
    .is_static = true, // whether static link
});

// add module
exe.addModule("webui", zig_webui.module("webui"));

// link library
exe.linkLibrary(zig_webui.artifact("webui"));

Zig 0.12 \ nightly

To be honest, I don’t recommend using the nightly version because the API of the build system is not yet stable, which means that there may be problems with not being able to build after nightly is updated.

1. Add to build.zig.zon

# It is recommended to replace the following branch with commit id
zig fetch --save https://github.com/webui-dev/zig-webui/archive/main.tar.gz
# Of course, you can also use git+https to fetch this package!

2. Config build.zig

Add this:

// To standardize development, maybe you should use `lazyDependency()` instead of `dependency()`
// more info to see: https://ziglang.org/download/0.12.0/release-notes.html#toc-Lazy-Dependencies
const zig_webui = b.dependency("zig-webui", .{
    .target = target,
    .optimize = optimize,
    .enable_tls = false, // whether enable tls support
    .is_static = true, // whether static link
});

// add module
exe.root_module.addImport("webui", zig_webui.module("webui"));

It is not recommended to dynamically link libraries under Windows, which may cause some symbol duplication problems. see this issue: ziglang/zig#15107

UI & The Web Technologies

Borislav Stanimirov discusses using HTML5 in the web browser as GUI at the C++ Conference 2019 (YouTube).

Web application UI design is not just about how a product looks but how it works. Using web technologies in your UI makes your product modern and professional, And a well-designed web application will help you make a solid first impression on potential customers. Great web application design also assists you in nurturing leads and increasing conversions. In addition, it makes navigating and using your web app easier for your users.

Why Use Web Browsers?

Today's web browsers have everything a modern UI needs. Web browsers are very sophisticated and optimized. Therefore, using it as a GUI will be an excellent choice. While old legacy GUI lib is complex and outdated, a WebView-based app is still an option. However, a WebView needs a huge SDK to build and many dependencies to run, and it can only provide some features like a real web browser. That is why WebUI uses real web browsers to give you full features of comprehensive web technologies while keeping your software lightweight and portable.

How Does it Work?

Think of WebUI like a WebView controller, but instead of embedding the WebView controller in your program, which makes the final program big in size, and non-portable as it needs the WebView runtimes. Instead, by using WebUI, you use a tiny static/dynamic library to run any installed web browser and use it as GUI, which makes your program small, fast, and portable. All it needs is a web browser.

Runtime Dependencies Comparison

	WebView	Qt	WebUI
Runtime Dependencies on Windows	WebView2	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser
Runtime Dependencies on Linux	GTK3, WebKitGTK	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser
Runtime Dependencies on macOS	Cocoa, WebKit	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser

Supported Web Browsers

Browser	Windows	macOS	Linux
Mozilla Firefox	✔️	✔️	✔️
Google Chrome	✔️	✔️	✔️
Microsoft Edge	✔️	✔️	✔️
Chromium	✔️	✔️	✔️
Yandex	✔️	✔️	✔️
Brave	✔️	✔️	✔️
Vivaldi	✔️	✔️	✔️
Epic	✔️	✔️	not available
Apple Safari	not available	coming soon	not available
Opera	coming soon	coming soon	coming soon

License

Licensed under the MIT License.