Gluon
Develop desktop apps from websites, using system installed browsers and NodeJS.
Quick Start GitHub DiscordCross-platform, Cross-browser, Cross-runtime
Gluon supports Windows, Linux, and Mac, with most Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers supported. You can also use Node, Deno, or Bun as the JS Runtime powering your app (experimental).
Platforms
Runtimes
Browsers
Performant
Gluon is not only versatile, but also one of the fastest frameworks out there. By looking into browser internals and using a curated set of flags, Gluon tries to squeeze out the most performance possible whilst also aiming to use less memory and resources.
Startup Time
Gluon
0.4s
Electron
0.5s
Tauri
0.9s
Neutralinojs
1.2s
Open Window API
Opening a Window in Gluon is as simple as one function call, with more options available if you need them like window size or loading extra code.
index.js
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('https://gluonjs.org');
IPC API
IPC (Inter-Process Communication) allows you to communicate between your Node backend and website frontend.
Gluon has an easy but powerful asynchronous IPC API, which is also near-identical in Node and the exposed Gluon web API to allow even easier and quicker development.
It also has multiple versatile sub-APIs for doing common things, wrapping the base API so most developers won’t need to use a needlessly complex event-based system:
Expose
Easily expose Node functions to Web.
Store
Share common data effortlessly between Node and Web both ways.
index.js
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('https://gluonjs.org');
Window.ipc.store.config = {
env: 'production'
};
import { writeFile } from 'fs/promises';
let log = '';
Window.ipc.log = msg => { // Log data to a log file on disk
log += msg;
writeFile('app.log', log); // Write to log file
};
site.js
// Get data from IPC Store
const { env } = Gluon.ipc.store.config;
env // 'production'
// Call exposed IPC function
Gluon.ipc.log('Stored to log file!');
Idle API Experimental
The Idle API is a unique feature to Gluon, allowing you to “hibernate” or “sleep” Gluon windows to save system resources.
Hibernation fully kills the browser internally (using ~30MB of memory), whilst sleep uses a screenshot of the page as a placeholder (using ~60MB of memory).
You can either hibernate, sleep, and wake up manually with the API, or use automatic idle management which will hibernate the window when minimized for a chosen period of time, and wake it up when it’s focused again for you.
index.js
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('https://example.com');
const sleep = ms => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
await sleep(5000); // Wait for the window to fully load
Window.idle.hibernate(); // Hibernate the window
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.wake(); // Wake up the window
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.sleep(); // Put the window to sleep
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.wake(); // Wake it up again
