frankhale / Nwjs Edge Example1

#nwjs-edge-example (Edge directly from DOM)

An example usage of NW.js and Edge.JS. This code calls a function inside a .NET class library from the DOM.

Having Trouble Building Edge for NW.js?

There are a lot of things that can go wrong preventing this example from working. For example, new NW.js builds containing Node versions that are not yet supported by Edge. Additionally getting a build environment setup on Windows can be challenging and difficult.

If you cannot get Edge built to work directly in NW.js then you may want to look at my new example which demonstrates using Edge from NW.js via spawning a regular Node process and interacting with it via Socket.IO. This allows for shipping a known good version of Node that Edge supports while preventing the complexities of building Edge for NW.js.

https://github.com/frankhale/nwjs-edge-example2

Usage

NOTE: Need NW.js?

• Clone or download a zip of this repository
• Unzip into it's own folder (assuming folder named edge-test-app)
• Unzip NW.js
• Copy nw-edge-example folder to NW.js folder
• Open command prompt to the NW.js folder
• Follow build instructions below to build the module
• Run using the command: nw nw-edge-example

C# Class Library

The SimpleLibrary.dll is built from the Hello.cs source file. I've omitted the Visual Studio project to build this from this repository. This library only contains one function as noted in the Hello.cs. Notice the function signature is special because by default Edge.JS wants to call asynchronous methods so it does not block the Javascript engine.

If you want to see more examples of using Edge.JS please see it's Github repository located at:

https://github.com/tjanczuk/edge

Development

Building Edge.JS for NW.js

Edge.JS has to be rebuilt using nw-gyp in order for it to work from within NW.js.

NOTE: By default Edge.JS is built using node-gyp and only works within Node.JS.

Things you need in order to build Edge.JS for use within NW.js:

• Visual Studio 2013
• Python 2.7.x
• Node.JS 5.x
• nw-gyp (npm install -g nw-gyp)

Next, open a command prompt to your source code directory and install the Edge.JS module using npm:

Create a folder on your desktop (for illustration call it my-app) and copy the Node-Webkit runtime files to it.

Next open a command prompt to the my-app folder and install the Edge.JS module:

c:\>cd my-app
c:\my-app>npm install edge

This will create a node-modules folder and then install edge into that folder. Now we need to recompile Edge using nw-gyp (instead of node-gyp which it is built with by default).

c:\my-app\>cd node_modules\edge
c:\my-app\node_modules\edge>nw-gyp configure --target=v0.13.3 --msvs_version=2013 --arch=x64
c:\my-app\node_modules\edge>nw-gyp build

Once the build finishes, the new module will be in:

c:\my-app\node_modules\edge\build\Release

Copy edge_coreclr.node and edge_nativeclr to: (depending on your architecture, I built against x64)

c:\my-app\node_modules\edge\lib\native\win32\x64\5.1.0

Author(s)

Frank Hale <[email protected]>
30 May 2016

License

GNU GPL v3 - see LICENSE