Smash Your Design with WebKit Presenters!

May 9, 2016

The presenters are the glue between your Java and JavaScript code in your DukeScript application. They make sure that your Java methods with JavaScriptBody annotation can properly pass their parameters to the JavaScript engine and receive results back.

The presenters make your application extremely portable. By selecting the right presenter when packaging your application you make sure it can run everywhere - on the desktop, on iOS, on Android, in a plugin-less browser, on your Raspberry PI, via JDK’s Nashorn script engine & co. Everywhere.

The Default Presenters

The HTML/Java project offers default presenter based on JavaFX WebView which is suitable for running your applications on any desktop that supports Java. However we all know the limits of JavaFX - bloated, unsupported (or at least ignored) by Oracle with JavaFX web view usually few releases behind any new advances in the WebKit technology. The aim of the DukeScript Presenters project is to fix this situation and sharpen the excellence of presentation by creating additional presenters.

The WebKit Presenter

Let’s take a look at our newly released version 1.0 of our WebKit presenter.

The WebKit presenter is an alternative presenter for your Mac OS X and Linux desktop applications - it avoids overhead of JavaFX and directly talks to native WebKit libraries giving you access to the most recent version of WebKit features and close integration with the underlying operating system - including native looking fonts and gestures.

To use this presenter follow the getting started tutorial. When your application is created open client/pom.xml and replace the existing presenter in the pom file (probably net.java.html.boot.fx) with:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.dukescript.presenters</groupId>
  <artifactId>webkit</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
</dependency>

With our native WebKit presenter the UI experience of users of your new DukeScript application will be on par with most modern WebKit browsers - for example when using the Charts API your graphs will render 100% the same and will feel as smooth as in the demo. The DukeScript Presenters are licensed under GPLv3 license, but the DukeScript Support is ready to offer you more business friendly license.

Improve UX of your DukeScript application and help the DukeScript project move forward: give WebKit presenter a try and share your experience with us!