Will this type of "pseudo webview2" work?

[philpw99]

First of all, I have great respect for everyone who worked on WebView2 project here. I tried the sample and indeed it's a great piece of software.

However, somehow I just cannot make it run with SciTE editor. Whenever I hit "F5", the sample scripts just runs then ends without error. The output messages are too complicated for me.

Those samples work perfectly if I compile them into exes. But obviously, it's quite inconvenient if I cannot run the script with AutoIt3.exe.

 

Recently I am experimenting with neutralinojs , which is a miniature Webview2 app builder.

Once an app is built, I will get an exe file that can run as a  barebone web browser. It doesn't have address bar or menus. I can even disable the title bar and make it look more like a control.

So I have done some experiment with it, and use the idea from Pseudo Embedded Chrome. Now I get a little sample package to show. You just need to extract the zip file and run the au3.

As you can see, the size of the whole thing is pretty small compared to other web app solutions. The good thing about this, is that it can run under SciTE. You will see the result and console output right away.

However, it can only run in x64bit windows, and it requires Webview2 be installed.

neutralinojs is quite flexible in programming. I think I can make changes to it so this customized web browser can take commands and data from the main au3 program.

Here I am just wondering. Will this kind of implementation of webview2 works for people here? Though it works for me,  it's more like a hack than the real deal.

-----

Update: The more I explore Netralinojs, the more I like it. Now I upload a new sample. This time I can set the size of the web browser in the json file before I create it.

Netralinojs itself support lots of cool features, combined with the power of Javascript. I think someone will find it useful.

hello-world.zip

Edited January 2, 2023 by philpw99

[argumentum]

43 minutes ago, philpw99 said:

However, it can only run in x64bit windows

... If you need Neutralinojs binaries for non-x64 CPU, learn how to build Neutralinojs from source with this guide. ...

[Gianni]

12 hours ago, philpw99 said:

First of all, I have great respect for everyone who worked on WebView2 project here. I tried the sample and indeed it's a great piece of software.

However, somehow I just cannot make it run with SciTE editor. Whenever I hit "F5", the sample scripts just runs then ends without error. The output messages are too complicated for me.

Those samples work perfectly if I compile them into exes. But obviously, it's quite inconvenient if I cannot run the script with AutoIt3.exe.

take a look at this post:

 https://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/204362-microsoft-edge-webview2-embed-web-code-in-your-native-application/?do=findComment&comment=1475295

in short, to run those scripts from SciTE, you should use as a second parameter, in the above function, a path pointing to a folder where you have read/write access, for example @scriptdir, or another path where you have write permission.

 

[philpw99]

OMG ! Thank you so much ! The answer is simple as that ! I missed one argument and the whole thing just went south. Well, you see? It's not that easy to figure it out. I looked into the returned results and they are just a long set of confusing function returns. None of them told me, "Hey, you miss some argument and need to fix it." They all returned "error = 0".

And it didn't help that the sample itself didn't fix this error.

Also the comments following your comment didn't give me any encouragement as well. Seems the whole thing is too complicated to continue.

[philpw99]

23 hours ago, argumentum said:

... If you need Neutralinojs binaries for non-x64 CPU, learn how to build Neutralinojs from source with this guide. ...

I don't think anyone who wants to utilize WebView2 still runs 32bit Windows. They should be very happy with the good old IE10.