I suppose but I don't think it is too far off. I have been reading through the Wails code and it seems like were almost there. I have wails version 2..2.0. At any rate I did a little side project just using webview to see how I could open up 2 windows. here: https://github.com/steowens/goWebView. At first when I did this I didn't pass the HINSTANCE of one into the create of another and essentially created 2 top level windows. This was bad. When I closed one of them the other would just hang and the entire process had to be killed. BUT, if I only create ONE top level window then I can create the second window as a child and it just displays another window but now I can close the child without ruining the parent.

Now digging through your code was a bit of a head scratcher. I got all the way down to the app package to the CreateApp function and became quite befuddled. I cannot for the life of me see how that bit of code actually creates a browser container with menus.

At any rate, when you do wails Run

// Run creates an application based on the given config and executes it
func Run(options *options.App) error {
	mainApp := application.NewWithOptions(options)
	return mainApp.Run()
}

I see that you are throwing away the pointer to the new application but I think it would be a great idea to return that pointer to the caller. Run could also include an optional pointer to a parent app so that when the child app starts it becomes a child window like the way I do in the raw webview things in my project link above.

The codebase is a little mixed up at the moment. There is a lot of tidying up to do and a need to move to a better API for multi window & multi tray. If you're keen on helping out, jump on discord and we can chat better there 👍 The discord link should be in slack if you can't find it.

Well I am starting to wrap my head around this where would I look to get on the discord channel?

Never mind, I downloaded the app and then clicked on forgot my password and got stuck in an interminable loop of captcha exercises. Not an app that the gods want me to use. It's horrible experiences like the one Discord provides that I am trying to improve upon.

Ok so they finally sent me a password reset link and I am on Discord. But how do I find you? I guess we need to friend up so here is my tag or whatever discord calls it: messageDelivered#2838

Try this https://discord.gg/WrtkKwWK

That worked thanks!

There's a lot to talk about with multiple windows - it's a non trivial task.

@leaanthony
I understand. Let me explain why I am very interested in this particular feature. I work with Kafka streams day in day out. The tool I use - Conduktor - which started as an excellent tool (fast, efficient) two years is now a bloated mess - slow to load, slow to react etc. This was slowing me down at work. So I started looking into how I could write a performant desktop client for Kafka management. I decided to use librdkafka on Flutter. But I needed to learn a lot of new tech and figure out how to use C library efficiently in Flutter. I know I don't have that much time to dedicate right now.

That is when I stumbled across wails. The moment I saw I can write my business logic in Go, I couldn't contain my glee. I plan to spend more time building stuff using wails so that when the multi window feature rolls out, I will be ready.

Thanks a lot for your effort. This is going to save a lot of dev time.

I also work with Kafka so interested to see what you come up with. Is there a particular problem multiple windows solve that simple routing couldn't?

I also work with Kafka so interested to see what you come up with. Is there a particular problem multiple windows solve that simple routing couldn't?

Yes. Here is what I usually do: There is a sender to a topic and there are 10 different topics that data gets produced into after various processing including error, stats etc. So I use one window to produce to the topic(sometimes in a loop), and then use separate windows to consume from the topics. This way, I can use the three finger swipe down - "App Expose" (in macOS trackpad) to see what is going on without leaving a single window. IMHO this makes it easy to grasp what happened at a glance instead of using the same window to consume to see what went down sequentially.

Hope this makes sense to you.

What do you think a good API would be for that?

Not sure about the specifics for Kafka but in general, having a way for the main window and the child windows to send messages to each other would be a good general purpose API. Each window could choose how to respond to those messages as it sees fit, and the Main Window would always be able to kill it's child windows if it sees fit. Probably not too different than the API that Kafka itself implements, publish and subscribe. Given that it's go, Channels seem the most appropriate, so if a window could be wrapped with a Go construct that is capable of sitting at the either end of channels that might be pretty darned cool. If you wanted the child windows to be able to communicate with each other they could do it in pub-sub fashion brokered by the parent window.

So basically what I would imagine is that there is a general object lets call it Window. It is responsible for setting up a single window which is basically what the App does today. Each window would be capable of implementing a message bus that it and it's children can connect to. This would enable maximum creativity. The app developer can design the message schemes that they find most suitable for their needs, and once you have achieved this abstraction then windows could launch to arbitrary depths. Entire trees of windows could interoperate in arbitrarily complex interactions.

Under this paradigm launching an app would be simply launching a window from the main function. Now digging in to the app code a bit I can see that it already takes a context object and context seems to implement the kind of functionality that one would want to build a message bus on. So I guess the only question is can there exist a wrapper stuct + functions that does what the typical wails main function does today so you can achieve recursion?

It looks like almost all of the pieces are nearly in place in the App construct. Couple things missing on options are start page, as an option, and I have no idea how an App actually launches the underlying window. It's beyond me how this code ends up producing the browser window we ultimately see when the app starts:

`// CreateApp creates the app!
func CreateApp(_ *options.App) (*App, error) {
	result := w32.MessageBox(0,
		`Wails applications will not build without the correct build tags. 
Please use "wails build" or press "OK" to open the documentation on how to use "go build"`,
    	"Error",
		w32.MB_ICONERROR|w32.MB_OKCANCEL)
	if result == 1 {
		exec.Command("rundll32", "url.dll,FileProtocolHandler", "https://wails.io/docs/guides/manual-builds").Start()
	}
	return nil, nil
}`

It has been rescheduled for v3

这个和tauri感觉定位不太一样，tauri封装了很多os api，wails需要你自己用go实现func然后bind给js。所以得需要自己写go代码，web只做交互和展示

功能比tauri弱不少，如果熟悉go可以考虑，但像这种框架后台语言完全可以使用自己熟悉的用，这个就当个浏览器壳子用了，这样跟这个交互也不是很多

I have been using wails for almost a year now and love it. This actually makes me want to contribute to my first open source project.
Thank you @leaanthony and all contributors for creating this wonderful framework

So kind @BenoitBotton! You are always welcome to contribute and we will help you in any way we can.

How come no one answered? I am also interested in knowing the ETA.

First, let me start with my apology to @leaanthony . Questions like mine:

Is there any planned release date or ETA?

are quite annoying. They don’t add any value to the discussion and come off as passive-aggressive. If someone has an annoying or stupid question, I believe it’s good practice to ignore them.

Please learn from my mistakes.

Regarding the Wails v3 release, the answer is simple: it will be done when it is ready. I believe there is no deadline, no budget, and no paying customer who can complain. Therefore, it will be done when it is done. To learn more about the progress and all the exciting new features, I recommend checking the Wails Discord channel wails3 at https://discord.com/channels/1042734330029547630/1065600636294549514.

That's fine @pavelbinar - if we knew, we'd say! There's only a couple of issues I want to iron out then we'll get to beta. Just no idea how long that might take 😅

From the example code of v3, it seems to be supported, but it's unknown whether the page loaded from a remote URL injects Wails runtime JS.

https://electron.nodejs.cn/docs/latest/tutorial/native-file-drag-drop
demo