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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

> scientific software ... where interfaces are notoriously bad.

I think the problem here is two fold: bad UIs and bad APIs. In the science world, there doesn't seem to be any abstraction between backend and frotnend -- the whole thing is one intertwined mess.

Scientists don't always write great software; they write scripts that get the job done quickly in a very specific way. Pair that with the lack of time that they have to wrap things in a GUI and you get a Tkinter/Qt app that is unmaintanable.

I'm currently volunteering with the NZ Department of Conservation. Here is a tiny preview [0] of an app that I have just started making for them. It's purpose is to aid scientists with processing camera trap images using machine learning. I'm building the UI using ElectronJS and Svelte, whilst the backend is a separate Python project.

[0] https://streamable.com/0ji1ii

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You realise it's possible to write a decent UI in Qt that isn't a dumpster fire from the codebase perspective right?

I know the fad these days is to turn everything into a web app but my experience working with Qt really just demonstrated to me that a lot of web UI development is reinventing wheels from desktop UI but poorly and with more bugs and frustration.

That's just my perspective though :-)

My personal experiences differs.

I recently spent a year working on a Qt app for drawing circuit diagrams, aimed at nuclear engineers. I've lost count of the number of times I found myself wishing for some feature that React has implemented for years.

The parts of the code that were easiest to maintain were the ones that reinvented reactive UI: every modification to the underlying data called some "updateGraphicsView" function that would then re-render the entire thing. Not great for performance, great for avoiding bugs.

Seriously, for me Qt goes in the "never again" category.

> I'm building the UI using ElectronJS and Svelte, whilst the backend is a separate Python project.

Thanks for sharing this. I have a relatively simple Python script that I'm trying to package for a non-technical Windows user so, as someone whose experience skews toward web development, your comment caught my attention.

I just googled "electron svelte python" and found this write up:

https://medium.com/@abulka/electron-python-4e8c807bfa5e

Which references this Github repo:

https://github.com/fyears/electron-python-example

It all sounds pretty brittle. How are you managing communication between your ElectronJS frontend and Python backend? Any references you recommend?

I think I came across that as well. I didn't like it.

As far as I understand, there are two ways to handle communication between the Python and ElectronJS:

1) Use inter-process communication. Basically, your Python app outputs to stdin and your Electron app consumes the output. Also works the other way. This is what I went with.

2) Use a Flask (or equivalent) local web server and have your app send requests to it.

I find method 2) a bit hacky and unintuitive for a desktop app. If you are planning on hosting your backend in the cloud this would be a decent solution, but I am not.

I had already done some work to turn my Python app into a standalone CLI tool using `click` [0] which made the interaction with ElectronJS very simple. I used `python-shell` [1] for the inter-process communication. I do think that I might not need this once I package my Python app into an .exe -- then Electron should be able to interact with it in some way without caring that it's built in Python.

You can take a look at my repo here, though it's still in its infancy: https://github.com/petargyurov/megadetector-gui

[0] https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/python-shell

Why not use something like gRPC or cap’n’proto to make the request/response stuff easier to manage?

Because it still requires request and response. The way you are doing request/response, or encoding the data is immaterial.

As far as quickly standing up an effective gui for python, I'd recommend gooey.

https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

Some time ago I helped build a software that heavily used some python GIS libraries (GDAL, rasterio, etc) and we needed a UI for some windows users. We chose cefpython[1] to the job, as we could interface easily between the python and JS parts. The development experience is not so polished as of Electron though.

Nonetheless, is a great project and not so difficult to use, although not perfect, it worked perfectly for our needs.

[1] https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython

NZer here, interested to hear more about how you ended up doing that.

Pasting my answer from a similiar comment above:

> I sent an email to a specific conservation project, asking if they happen to need any software help at the moment and they did. We got chatting, agreed on some goals and I got working. I signed their volunteer agreement form which sets out some conditions (nothing unsurprising). That's it really.

For what it's worth I am not even based in NZ; I'm in the UK. Happy to chat in more detail if you want to know more (my email is in my profile)

This is very pretty. Great job on the frontend.

That actually looks really cool! Are you planning to display the output in the UI as well?

Thanks! Yes, I am. The intention is for the user to also be able to correct the output of the model.

After that I want to give the user an easy interface for training their own models (transfer learning using an existing base model).

How is Electron doing btw? I'm itching to use it in one project but it doesn't feel like it's getting any traction in the community for a long time now. Since it's a long term project I kind of get mixed feelings about using it.

This is my first project with it so I'm probably not in a position to provide much insight. So far development with it has been almost identical to coding a website, but maybe because I am yet to start on any OS dependant features.

What makes you say that it isn't getting traction? AFAIK, some huge companies are using it to create their apps.

I think it gets a lot of underserved hate, just because it's JS and because it isn't "truly native". People also love to chime in about its performance but 9/10 times that's down to a bad implementation, in my humble opinion.

On top of that, I already have a browser installed and each Electron app is a step for turning the Web into ChromeOS.

Is there any benefit to using electron vs a website with the same code? Especially if you want it to be free and accessible to everyone

I have built a couple Electron apps, one of which will be available as a commercial product soon.

The main advantages (over executing your app in-browser) to my knowledge:

1. You can execute native code outside normal browser sandbox

2. You get your own application window

Wait, you can execute say c++ using electron?

Yep: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/using-native-node-m...

You can even have multiple application windows! But VS Code is the only one I can think of that bothers.

God forbid you want to be in two Slack orgs at the same time, perhaps on different virtual desktops. Off to the browser version with you!

That's just bad usability on Slack's part, not a technical limitation of the tech. Also, afaik Slack is/has moving away from Electron.

Agreed on the bad usability, but that's par for the course with most Electron apps. You get the laziest possible "stuffed a webpage in a window" UI. And maybe it's even a nice UI in some ways, but it's usually pretty clear that it's not native software.

Re: moving away from Electron, not as far as I know. They had a major update a year or so ago to make some big efficiency gains by not running a separate Electron instance for each organization, but the new version is still in Electron: https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop/

One can hope that they'll take the iPad version and make some improvements to let ARM Mac users get that instead, but currently they've chosen to disable downloading it from the Mac App Store.

Spotify is an Electron app that's doing well. Also my own company's experiences with it have been good.

Spotify isn't an Electron app. It predates Electron and uses CEF ( https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework ), like Steam.

I should have said Slack.

As a curious New Zealander, how does one volunteer with a government department? I had always assumed it would have to be strictly a contractor type relationship

I sent an email to a specific conservation project, asking if they happen to need any software help at the moment and they did. We got chatting, agreed on some goals and I got working. I signed their volunteer agreement form which sets out some conditions (nothing unsurprising). That's it really.

Ah, interesting! I had just assumed that most departments wouldn't have a process for handling this kind of stuff or that it would be considered more costly in terms of getting a signed agreement, coordinating etc etc

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