Sync/keepalive for Blink.jl/Interact.jl?

General Usage
1

I’m sure I just haven’t been good enough at reading the docs/source, but I can’t seem to find any obviously canonical way of using Blink.jl without having it quit immediately. I mean, I could use it from the REPL, but other than that? If I run a Julia program such as, say, one based on a simple Interact example, i.e.,

using Interact, Blink
ui = button()
w = Window()
body!(w, ui)

then that runs just fine, setting up the window properly … and then the program quits. If I add, say, an infinite loop or read(stdin) or something at the end, things work as they should, but surely there must be a better way of doing this? (Is there, for example, a process I could wait for, or something?) I’m assuming not everyone is using Blink from the REPL…?

I’m sorry for probably missing something obvious, here :->

2

Maybe there is a better way, but heres your infinite loop…

while window.content.sock.state == WebSockets.ReadyState(1) 
       sleep(0.1)
end
3

Thanks. I’d sort of hope there’d be a better way :-}

4

Me too. I use that in a context where I have the loop running anyway from a package function in a REPL session, and just need to check the window is still there.

I haven’t actually tried to run it from a script.

5

I couldn’t find any solutions to this, still … maybe I missed something? (If not, I might look into solving the issue, I guess.)

6

A possible semi-solution:

using Blink
window = Window()
# …
success(window.shell.proc)

Still digging into the innards (could be added to the Blink.jl API, perhaps), but beyond that, it also produces an error, as the Julia side seems to keep parsing bytes from Electron, even after you quit it:

Unexpected end of input
 ...when parsing byte with value '0'
Stacktrace:
7

It seems like Electron.jl is more amenable to this approach (and I don’t really need the extra functionality of Blink, I think):

using Electron
window = Window()
# …
success(window.app.proc)

Or one could use, say:

success(Electron.default_application().proc)

Or … success would only make sense once other stuff has already been set up, so there would already be at least one application – so one could use:

success.(app.proc for app in applications())

Would be nice to avoid digging inside Application, but … :man_shrugging: