Has anyone found a good solution for WebView on Co...

# compose-desktop

[Mike Dawson]

Has anyone found a good solution for WebView on Compose/Desktop? Compose WebView multiplatform right now uses KCEF (which bundles an entire copy of Chromium). Even that doesn't initialize on ubuntu for me (same issue as noted on WebViewKO below)

WebViewKO - doesn't seem to want to cooperate on Ubuntu: https://github.com/Winterreisender/webviewko/issues/17

WebViewJava - I can get it to run, but demo of connecting with AWT/Swing crashes. Doesn't seem to be currently maintained.

My current workaround: running web content in an internal web server, and running chrome with the --app command (removes the address bar etc).

This seems like a major gap in the Compose/Desktop platform: most real world apps use webviews somewhere (authentication, external content presentation, etc)

[Mike Dawson]

If someone just needs to display css/html that they control, then https://github.com/radkovo/CSSBox/ can work (but if the css/html is external, or Javascript is involved, then it might not display as desired).

[benkuly]

For authentication you can also use custom protocol handlers.

[Mike Dawson]

I don't have a problem serving content... I have an embedded http server... Problem has been getting a webview that will actually display something

[Mike Dawson]

e.g. the login form itself if doing authentication

[Henri Gourvest]

I haven't tried it myself, but I know that JetbrainsRuntime (JBR) now includes JCEF. There must be a way to create a webview in Jetpack Compose.

[Mike Dawson]

You'd think so... but I have been through many paths (as per the github issues posted) - and there doesn't seem to be a reliable / well supported way to do it

[Mike Dawson]

Also - I think requiring the use of an Embedded Chromium (100MB+, after download, uses 400MB+) to display basic HTML/CSS/JS is far from ideal

[Henri Gourvest]

Perhaps you could tell us more about the application you're developing. Why is HTML absolutely necessary to render content generated by the application itself?

[Mike Dawson]

I'm developing an open source learning management system that is optimized for offline and limited connectivity environments.

I need to render EPubs (ebooks - which are essentially zipped HTML with some manifests)

[Mike Dawson]

An epub Manifest has a spine - which is essentially a sequence of HTML files that are contained in the zip.

[Mike Dawson]

e.g. the ideal way to handle it would be to use a LazyColumn where each item is a WebView that loads the given document

[Henri Gourvest]

I see, it's not a simple problem, I don't think you'll be able to fully support the Epub 3 format without embedding a full browser. Have you considered the PDF format?

[Mike Dawson]

I already implemented PDF support (using PDFBox to render)

[Mike Dawson]

A lot of content comes in EPUB... and epub is much better for reading on screen as it is responsive to screen size

[Mike Dawson]

WebviewKO was an attempt at using webview.dev exactly for this problem - uses libraries already found on the native system

[Mike Dawson]

https://github.com/Winterreisender/webviewko

[Henri Gourvest]

Looking at the error message,
Gtk-Message: 204958.186: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module".
I have the impression that this is something that could be solved by telling the application where to look for libraries, I had to configure LD_LIBRARY_PATH in one of my projects so that my JNI module could find another library on certain systems.

[Mike Dawson]

This "Gtk-Message: 174749.115: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"" message comes every time I run my desktop app (and with some other apps on my system), doesn't seem to be a problem

[Mike Dawson]

I think this "(java:122608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 204958.233: cannot register existing type 'GdkDisplayManager'" is the problem