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by fabiospampinato 2194 days ago
Sure, I suppose maybe Sciter makes this easier to code, but one could totally do the same in Electron as well, that doesn't seem a good enough reason to not go with HTML/CSS/JavaScript proper rather than whatever Sciter implements.
1 comments

Well, applications that use Sciter UI are native ones: https://sciter.com/#customers

And applications that use Electron are not. Just because the only reasonable option (for many reasons) to write code there is script. And so each such application will have full blown web browser and web server (NodeJs) under the hood.

What's your definition of "native" though? Sciter interprets "scripts", Electron interprets JavaScript, it'd say both will produce (to varying degrees) interpreted applications. Either of them can run code written in other languages, again with varying degrees of ease, e.g. https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...

Last time I checked Evernote, mentioned in the page you linked, renders notes under macOS using WebKit, why don't they use Sciter?

> What's your definition of "native" though?

Let's take some typical native GUI calculator application.

The code a) creates window by calling CreateDialog(...,template,...). That template sits in .RC file - that is UI layout and structure definition.

Then you have b) event handling code and c) so called business layer code (a.k.a. data model code) that does calculation that end up in UI again.

Same thing in applications that use Sciter. It is just that UI definitions are not in some proprietary format but in HTML/CSS. Rest is the same - event handling is done either in script (that will end up in some native calls) or directly in native code - Sciter allows event handlers to be defined in native code directly. So Sciter applications are native ones in this regard.

As of EverNote...

EverNote 2.0 was using what later will become Sciter Engine.

Please check my article: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

At some point they hired technical director who made decision to switch to WebKit. No one knows reasoning behind that very bad decision (IMO) but the company lost innovation momentum somewhere around that time.

My https://notes.sciter.com/ is just a proof that you don't need WebKit for those tasks.