Hello, I'm surprised there are still people in th...

# graviton-browser

[mikehearn]

Hello,

I'm surprised there are still people in this old channel. But for those who are curious what happened to the Graviton Browser, the answer is that a few years later I founded a company with the goal of making app distribution much easier. Hydraulic Conveyor is a less radical approach than Graviton. It's a CLI tool that lets you easily package, sign/notarize, upload and update apps with one command. It builds for every target platform simultaneously, so you can release apps direct from your dev laptop regardless of what you use. There is no third party runtime or browser component; the JVM is bundled (and it also does Electron, Flutter and other stuff). It can also release directly to GitHub Releases/Pages. So this is if anything easier than Graviton was in some ways, as you don't need to release via Maven Central or convince users to install some third party program.

The downside compared to the Graviton experiment is that you need to buy your own signing keys to get the best UX. Also, for commercial apps, you have to pay for it (it's free for open source apps).

Conveyor made sense to build because although Graviton kept your apps up to date, it didn't actually have a good way to keep itself up to date, and the same issue applies to other third party updaters for the JVM/Kotlin ecosystem. Conveyorized apps use OS native update mechanisms (MSIX/Sparkle/apt-get) so it doesn't have that problem.

I'm still interested in ideas and research around new web-like-but-not browsers. Some years later I wrote a design doc for a non-web protocol that would deliver some of the same benefits, but have no plans to implement it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oDBw4fWyRNug3_f5mXWdlgDI4J5AbxVWKEeYr6hscT8/edit?usp=sharing

I'll leave this channel now to clean up my channel list but hope that if you still need a deployment and update solution for your apps, then Conveyor can help. I sometimes answer questions about it in #compose-desktop and #tornadofx, there's also a Discord where you can find us. Sayonara!