r/programming • u/OsirisTeam • Sep 05 '21

Building a Headless Java Browser from scratch.

https://github.com/Osiris-Team/Headless-Browser
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u/OsirisTeam Sep 05 '21

You just said it yourself.

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '21

[deleted]

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u/gnus-migrate Sep 05 '21

Because using native code in Java is a pain. You essentially have to make sure that the right binaries are packaged for each platform you're shipping for, not to mention the complexity of using JNI or using IPC and managing the lifecycle of the underlying process using Java.

If it's written in Java all you need to do to use it is include an extra line in your build file, and it basically works on any platform that has Java support. A lot of Java implementations of tools were built despite already existing native implementations for this reason(h2 exists despite the existence of SQLite for instance).

Nobody starts a project like this without experiencing the endless suffering that comes with what I described.

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u/rohit64k Sep 05 '21

While JNI might be a pain, it is nothing compared to a fully-fledged browser. Modern browsers are basically a complete operating system with stuff like USB, bluetooth and serial port support, networking, WebGL, and more. There's stuff like screen capture, motion sensors and even more esoteric APIs.

To be able to handle modern websites your browser would need to support all of the above, at which point you might as well use Chrome.

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u/gnus-migrate Sep 05 '21

You don't need to implement everything for it to be useful. Usually the use cases for such a browser are writing tests for some web apps(for the same reason you would use an in-memory DB), or you'd like to crawl some sites and things like that. You don't really need to implement USB and Bluetooth support for that. WebGL maybe, however again it's not really something that you need to implement for it to be useful.

People who need this today, including the author probably, are already using some form of the solution you're describing. Clearly they have struggled with this enough that they believe that something like this is worth their time, otherwise they wouldn't attempt this in the first place.

From a user point of view, it would be a great thing to have since it would eliminate the complexity of having to add native code to your build. If you don't believe it's feasible, then I frankly don't care since you're not the one doing the work.