rohitvarkey / Blink.jl

Web-based GUIs for Julia

Blink.jl

Blink.jl provides a Julia API for creating and working with browser windows, (currently) via Atom-Shell.

Basic usage:

Pkg.add("Blink")
using Blink
a = Blink.init() # initialise the atom-shell process
w = Window(a) # Open a new window
body!(w, "<h1>Hello World</h1>") # Set the body content
loadurl(w, "http://julialang.org") # Load a web page

For options see the functions defined in window.jl, which closely follow atom-shell's API.

BlinkDisplay

Blink.jl also provides the the BlinkDisplay module, which provides a pop-up window for Julia graphics.

using Blink, Gadfly
BlinkDisplay.init()
plot(x = 1:100, y = cumsum(rand(100)-0.5), Geom.line)

You'll see a pop up window open for each plot. If you want to use the same window for subsequent plots call the pin() function. Also available is pin(id) (where a window's id is displayed in its title bar) and unpin().

Blink.jl also provides the docs() and docs("search") functions for quickly viewing the Julia manual. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future it will include nice tools for exploring images, datasets etc.

Display System

Blink.jl ships with its own display system, which enables the user handle multiple input/output devices and decide what media types get displayed where. By default, BlinkDisplay.init() simply calls

setdisplay(Media.Graphical, BlinkDisplay._display)

which means "display graphical output on the BlinkDisplay device". You could also set tabular data (e.g. Matrices and DataFrames) to display with Blink.jl:

setdisplay(Media.Tabular, BlinkDisplay._display)
rand(5, 5) #> Displays in pop up window

or set the display for specific types (abstract or concrete):

setdisplay(FloatingPoint, BlinkDisplay._display)
2.3 #> Displays with Blink

In principle you can also set displays for a given input device, although this needs more support from Base to work well.

Use

unsetdisplay(Media.Tabular)

to undo the change.

Debugging

Blink.init(debug = true) will initialize Atom-Shell with output redirected to the terminal. If you have node-inspector installed, it will also launch a debugger for the Atom-Shell browser process.

You can open the devtools for a specific window with tools(w).

Issues & Caveats

• Blink.jl communicates with browser processes over TCP. This limits the practicality of JS interop; you need to write a JS gui with a Julia backend as opposed to a pure-Julia app. Hopefully in the future we can get something more direct going with Cxx.jl & libchromiumcontent
• On Windows, the spawned process dumps its output into Julia's STDOUT, which is kind of annoying.