Add support for more browsers about flammarion HOT 4 CLOSED

Hi (I'm Victor Shepelev from ruby-talk, we chatted about your awesome library there).
Have your considered usage of Launchy gem? It seems like exactly suiting the task "just launch default browser".

BTW, when I've thought about similar library, I thought there's no need in complications like WebSockets. In any case, both "main" code (irb, for ex.) and "webserver" are in the same process, so they could exchange information through just variables or something. This approach eliminates need for EventMachine, something simple could work:

require 'sinatra/base'

$bad_global = 1

class TestMe < Sinatra::Base
  get '/' do
    $bad_global += 1 
    'it works!'
  end
end

Thread.new{
  TestMe.set :server, :webrick
  TestMe.run!(port: 1234)
}

trap('INT'){
  exit
}

loop do
  p "tick! global: #{$bad_global}"
  sleep(1)
end

OK, globals are bad, but something not-that-bad can be used.

from flammarion.

Hi Victor,

I hadn't heard of Launchy. Thanks for pointing it out!

The main reason I initially tied Flammarion to Chrome and then started adding the option of Electron is they have command line options for launching without any browser-like trappings, which gives flammarion windows a more native application-like feeling, rather than a webpage feeling. Launchy will definitely be a nice fallback mechanism, though.

I agree that the dependency on EventMachine is annoying; however, websockets work perfectly for this approach. There needs to be constant two-way communication between from ruby process (for when commands like puts or button get called) to the javascript interpreter (i.e., the browser), and from the javascript interpreter back to the ruby process (for when the user clicks a button, or types in some input). Sending JSON messages over WebSockets handles this really well. Maybe I'll just write a pure ruby websockets server eventually.

I initially started out writing little interfaces with Sinatra, like you suggest. The issues I mostly ran into were things like how to push changes to the page from the ruby process (you could use AJAX and polling, but that's kind of annoying). And creating new routes all the time to display different kinds of information got tedious. It's totally doable, but I abandoned the approach when it got annoying. (Not to dissuade you from trying out your approach, of course; that's just what I encountered.)

Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate the interest in this project!

from flammarion.

I agree that the dependency on EventMachine is annoying; however, websockets work perfectly for this approach.

Ah, ok, I see now. Quick googling showed up all Ruby WebSocket implementations are EventMachine-dependent :( Maybe some "naive" implementation can work in this case ... Will think about it.

from flammarion.

Hmm.. There is https://github.com/imanel/websocket-ruby and https://github.com/saward/Rubame seems like it should be fairly easy to remove event machine. Adding it to the todo list (#19)

Update: It was actually really easy: 144a40f

from flammarion.