[PD] A web frontend for Pd

[Christof Ressi]

That's exciting news!

> but I hope it shows that there is a tcl-tk-compatible, non-tcl-tk 
> future possible for Pd. 
I am very much looking forward to such a future :-)

Christof

On 16.03.2023 22:02, Giulio Moro via Pd-list wrote:
> Here's something the Chair and Bela teams have been working on for a 
> few months: a proof-of-concept web interface to Pd.
>
>  https://github.com/BelaPlatform/pure-data-web-GUI
>
> This leverages the refactored communication protocol effort by 
> Iohannes in order to obtain a "toolkit-agnostic Core<->GUI 
> Communication" 
> (https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/discussions/1695), which 
> resulted in https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1765 . This is 
> part of a broader project outlined in 
> https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1693 .
>
> Now, this pure-data-web-GUI repo comprises three components:
>
> - pd: is started with -guiport so that it doesn't start its own GUI
> - the "shim": a very thin layer of websocket that forwards messages 
> to/from Pd and the browser
> - the "frontend": the actual HTML5 stuff, written using the svelte 
> framework.
>
> For now, you can try it out with docker following the instructions 
> included in the repo. The easiest way is to run it with the Pd it 
> comes with (which is run inside docker and thus doesn't have 
> audio/MIDI I/O capabilities), but you can easily connect it to your 
> own Pd server instance (assuming it comes from this branch 
> https://github.com/giuliomoro/pure-data-1/). The docker containers are 
> used to simplify the development effort, but ultimately this can be 
> packaged up in a self-contained app (even for Android, if required), 
> or you can have it run embedded (e.g.: on a Bela board) while 
> displaying the GUI in a web browser (which is actually our primary goal).
>
> It is by no mean complete or perfect, but I hope it shows that there 
> is a tcl-tk-compatible, non-tcl-tk future possible for Pd. As it is, 
> it even allows (well, with a lot of effort on the user side, but very 
> little effort was put into it from the dev side) to patch on a 
> touchscreen.
>
> You may be wondering how this differs from the purr-data web GUI. Good 
> question. This is a complete rewrite and it aims to use "stock" Pd as 
> a backend server, by means of a communication protocol that has been 
> refactored (by Iohannes) such that Pd no longer sends out raw tk 
> messages, but rather tcl-compatible commands that are higher level and 
> also easier to parse in other languages (the parser here is written in 
> js). So right now you can run the same Pd binary (from this branch) 
> deciding at runtime if using a tcl GUI or a web GUI. Nifty. The aim is 
> eventually to upstream this communication protocol into vanilla, to 
> make it easier to swap GUI frontends. Hopefully this can eventually 
> help other forks with custom GUIs such as PlugData so that they don't 
> have to maintain their own fork of Pd.
>
> Best,
> Giulio
>
>
>
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