Thursday, March 25, 2021

Photino: Native, Cross-Platform Web UI Desktop Apps with .NET Core (vs. Electron)

Photino: Native, Cross-Platform Web UI Desktop Apps

 Photino: Native, Cross-Platform Web UI Desktop Apps

Photino Hello world screen for Windows 10

TryPhotino @GitHub

Photino enables developers to use fast, natively compiled languages like C#, C++, Java and more.
Use your favorite development frameworks like .NET Core 5.

Photino is an incredibly light, cross-platform framework for creating apps up to 110 times smaller than Electron apps! And it uses far less system memory too!


Photino is a collection of packages that can be used for different platforms and technologies. The different packages use Photino.Native as their base package. Photino.Native is a C++ (and Objective-C) wrapper around the OS’s built-in WebKit-based browser control in it. On Windows it uses the Chromium Edge based WebView2 control, on macOS it uses Safari’s WKWebView and on Linux it uses WebKitGTK+ 2. The Photino.Native package is compiled for each platform and distributed via NuGet.

Using the native browser control reduces the overall footprint of a Photino application since there is no need to bundle WebKit in the application. Photino is cross-platform because the application communicates with the wrapper in exactly the same way on any OS. This means developers only need one code base for all desktop platforms.

While we’re concentrating on using Photino with .NET Core 5, it could be used to build Web UIs for desktop applications written in any language, like C++, Go, Rust, Java, Objective-C and others!