Website as GUI

Who the fuck creates an application as a locally hosted website?
Are GUIs really that hard to program that you need to create a whole web application to avoid building one?
Fuck you, Ruby programmers.

s/Ruby/Ruby on Rails/g

Well, no, but it is fucking annoying. There are no good cross-platform GUI libraries. GTK is shit that reimplements seeples in C, Qt requires it's own preprocessor, WxWidgets will leave you with a 25MB Hello World. And that's just to get shit onto the screen in the same way, you can expect to triple your effort with all the hints and annotations needed to make it work well on all screen sizes and what not. Just let the web browser take care of it. It's pathetically easy to open a port, parse a few headers, and spit out some HTML, even in languages where the GUI libraries are basically nonexistant or worthless (every language except C and shit made by MS, which are all just macros for .NET bloatware).

Are GUIs really that hard to program that you need to create a whole web application to avoid building one?

Is your time really so worthless that you need to create a blingy GUI just to avoid pawning it off to some other program for bragging rights?

printf("<h1>%s</h1>\n", title);

vs

UIWindow::WindowHandler wh = new UIWindow::WindowHandler( \
UIWindow::getRootWindow(UIWindow::DefaultDisplay), \
0, 0, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0, \
UIWindow::GetXResolution( \
UIWindow::getRootWindow(UIWindow::DefaultDisplay)), \
UIWindow::GetYResolution( \
UIWindow::getRootWindow(UIWindow::DefaultDisplay)));
wh.MapWindow(UIWindow::getRootWindow(UIWindow::DefaultDisplay));
wh.CreateRenderingContext(UIWindow::DefaultRenderingContext);
wh.SetBackgroundColour(UIWindow::DefaultBackground);
wh.SetForegroundColour(UIWindow::DefaultForeground);

UIWindow::TextObject txto = new UIWindow::TextObject( \
UIWindow::TextObject.DefaultFont, 24\
UIWindow::TextObject.DPIScalable|UIWindow::TextObject.SubpixelHinting, \
UIWindow::TextObject.Centred);
wh.RegisterRepaintHandler(txto);
wh.ForceRepaint(true);

>>3
Is your work really so worthless that you refuse to spend time on it?

Are GUIs really that hard to program that you need to create a whole web application to avoid building one?

yes

unless you tk.. but then your GUI looks bad and resizes badly.

With a web-GUI, you automatically gain platform independence, web-deployability, and free yourself from having to use shitty bindings to some (platform-dependent and possibly GPL-licensed) GUI library. So yes, it has its advantages.

>>5
Unless all you write is hello world and fibs, you should probably spend time on the thing that made you want to write the program in the first place. Only if you thought "I know, I'll write some program with a great GUI!" should you spend so much time on the GUI.

Anyway, gtkwebkit should be enough for anybody.

Ancient web design secrets from the guru himself
http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

>>1
People who want a platform neutral UI for their app can use web technology as that platform. Network applications are best suited for this for example, a community public library with many branches would take this approach.

>>1-10
Now it's time to check my doubles, kids.

>>11
Checkèd.

I use the web deployment when programming in Haxe on Windows just because I don't want to install Visual Shit++ 2000 and Anus

GUIs are actually the most unrewarding programming task. A web page front end is also much lighter because browsers and all its libraries are already loaded on a users machine. The overhead of a statically linked web server is less than that of GTK or the like.

The current industry trend is in favor of web apps.
Web apps allow to make crossplatform subscription/microtransaction services(frontend) and hide most code behind servers(closed source backend).
You can't "pirate" web apps or reverse engineer them, because you never see the original code, only the website frontend(which could be minified obfuscated javascript+json+AJAX).

>>14
They should make GUIs in visual basic or c# then.