Introduction

kwui is a gui toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It works on Windows, and Android. kwui is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows for flexible licensing of client applications. kwui is inspired by rust-sciter, that use JavaScript and CSS to describe the UI, and Rust for business logic.

The kwui toolkit contains “widgets”: GUI components such as buttons, text input, or windows.

kwui depends the following libraries:

  • Skia: Skia is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. More information available on the Skia website.
  • Direct2D: Direct2D is a 2D graphics library for windows platform.
  • QuickJS: QuickJS is a small and embeddable JavaScript engine.

kwui is divided into three parts:

  • kwui-rs: kwui-rs is the Rust binding to the C++ kwui-sys library.

    • Provides simple and type-safe API.
    • Integrate with cargo crates ecosystem.

  • kwui-sys: kwui-sys is written in C++. It inter-operates with underline operating system, render the user interface, and handle user input events. It's pretty complex, some features:

    • Renderer: Direct2D or Skia
    • Layout and style: CSS
    • Scripting: builtin JavaScript engine with JSX extension support.
    • Data model: React Hooks alike JavaScript functional components.
    • Platform-dependent resource system

  • kwui-cli: kwui-cli is a command line tool.

    • Create project template.
    • Package application resources.
    • Provide build assistance for Windows and Android target platform.