Tauri is a toolchain for creating small, fast, and secure desktop apps from your existing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this article, Kelvin explains how Tauri plays well with the progressive framework Vue.js by integrating both technologies in bundling an example web app called nota as a native application.

Technology makes our lives better, not just users, but also creators (developers and designers). In this article, I’ll introduce you to Tauri. This article will be useful to you if:

• you have been building applications on the web with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you want to use the same technologies to create apps targeted at Windows, macOS, or Linux platforms;
• you are already building cross-platform desktop apps with technologies like Electron, and you want to check out alternatives;
• you want to build apps with web technologies for Linux distributions, such as PureOS;
• you are a Rust enthusiast, and you’d like to apply it to build native cross-platform applications.

We will look at how to build a native cross-platform application from an existing web project. Let’s get to it!

Note: This article assumes you are comfortable with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Vue.js.

WHAT IS TAURI?

The official website sums up Tauri well:

• Tauri is a polyglot toolchain for building more secure native apps with both tiny and fast binaries. By “polyglot”, I mean that Tauri uses multiple programming languages. At the moment, Rust, JavaScript, and TypeScript are used. But there are plans to let you use Go, C++, Python, and more.
• It lets you use any HTML and JavaScript-based front-end framework, such as Vue.js, React, or Angular, to build a native desktop app, and it can be integrated into any pipeline.
• It helps you build and bundle binaries for major desktop platforms (mobile and WebAssembly coming soon).

So, basically, Tauri allows you to use web technologies to create tiny and secure native desktop apps.

On its GitHub page, Tauri is described as a framework-agnostic toolchain for building highly secure native apps that have tiny binaries (i.e. file size) and that are very fast (i.e. minimal RAM usage).

Why Not Electron?

A popular tool for using web technologies to build desktop applications is Electron.

However, Electron apps have a rather large bundle size, and they tend to take up a lot of memory when running. Here is how Tauri compares to Electron:

• Bundle
• The size of a Tauri app can be less than 600 KB.
• Memory
• The footprint of a Tauri app is less than half the size of an Electron app.
• Licence
• Relicensing is possible with Tauri, but not with Electron. Electron ships with Chromium right out of the box. However, Chromium includes a digital rights-management system named Widevine. The inclusion of Widevine in Chromium makes apps created with Electron frowned upon by users of platforms such as PureOS for the sole reason that it is not free/libre open-source software (FLOSS). Platforms like PureOS are verified by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This means that they can only publish free and open-source software in their app stores.

In a nutshell, if your app is built with Electron, it will never be shipped officially in the PureOS store. This should be a concern for developers targeting such distributions.

#vue #vue.js #tauri #programming