thrust

Thrust enables you to create rich cross-platform (MacOSX, Windows and Linux) desktop applications from the language of your choice (Go, NodeJS, Python, Java, ...). Thrust is based on Chromium and uses web-pages as its GUI, so you can see it as a minimal Chromium browser controlled by your code.

Thrust lets you create and manage native windows, load web contents, manage native OS integrations (dock, menus, ...) through a standard IO API.

Contrary to atom-shell or node-webkit, thrust does not rely on or embed NodeJS, making it usable directly from your usual programming environment (simple require in NodeJS, pip package, Go dependency, ...)

Thrust is used by Breach

[Thurst Architecture]

            (Platform)                [stdio]       (Your Implementation)
                                                                           
                                         #
                 +------------------+    #        +-----------------------+  | 
                 |   Cocoa / Aura   |    #    +---|    win3: (HTML/JS)    |  |
                 +---------+--------+    #    |  +-----------------------++  |
                           |             #    +--|    win2: (HTML/JS)    |   | client
+--------------+ +---------+--------+    #    | +-----------------------++   |
|              +-+   thrust (C++)   +---------+-+    win1: (HTML/JS)    |    |
|  ContentAPI  | +---------+--------+    #      +-----------------------+    |
|              |           |             #                 | (TCP/FS)      
|  (Blink/v8)  | +---------+--------+    #      +-----------------------+    |
|              | +   JSON RPC srv   +-----------+ Client App (any Lang) |    | server
+--------------+ +------------------+    #      +-----------------------+    |
                                         #

Using thrust

To use thrust you need to rely on a binding library for your programming language. Libraries are currently available for Go and NodeJS.

If you want to create a binding library for another language, please get in touch ASAP (We're especially looking for people willing to contribute for Python, Ruby, Java, Rust).

Thrust is supported on MacOSX, Windows and Linux.

NodeJS

To use thrust with NodeJS, you just need to add node-thrust as a dependency. Contrary to atom-shell or node-webkit, you can rely on your vanilla NodeJS installation and don't need to recompile native addons with custom binary images.

Additionally you can use npm to distribute your application (it only has to depend on the node-thrust package).

npm install node-thrust

At postinstall a binary image of thrust is automatically downloaded for your platform (form this repository's releases)

// test.js
require('node-thrust')(function(err, api) {
  api.window({
    root_url: 'https://www.google.com/',
    size: {
      width: 1024,
      height: 768
    }
  }).show(function(err) {
    console.log('WINDOW CREATED');
  })
});

See breach/node-thrust for more details.

Go

[TODO]

See miketheprogrammer/go-thrust for more details.

Roadmap

• window creation create, show, close resize, minimize, maximize, ...
• window events close, blur, focus, unresponsive, crashed
• cross-platform equivalent support on MacOSX, Windows and Linux
• sessions off the record, custom storage path, custom cookie store
• kiosk kiosk mode
• application menu global application menu (MacOSX, X11/Unity)
• webview webview tag (secure navigation, tabs management)
• python python bindings library
• frameless frameless window and draggable regions
• tray icon tray icon native integration
• remote thrust specific IPC mechanism for client/server communication
• protocol specific protocol reigstration (fille://, ...)
• proxy enable traffic proxying (Tor, header injection, ...)

Building thrust

You will generally don't need to build thrust yourself. A binary version of thrust should be automatically fetched by the library you're reyling on at installation.

To build thrust, you'll need to have python 2.7.x and git installed. You can then boostrap the project with:

./scripts/boostrap.py                                

Build both the Release and Debug targets with the following commands:

./scripts/update.py
./scripts/build.py

Note that bootstrap.py may take some time as it checks out brightray and downloads libchromiumcontent for your platform.

Getting Involved

• Mailing list: breach-dev@googlegroups.com
• IRC Channel: #breach on Freenode