What are you trying to say? That building a new web-based Roon client application should be a matter of weeks rather than years?
Well, not sure I’m saying anything of the sort. But what’s in my mind is that there must be several “.NET MAUI for Web” projects underway by now. Might be a plan to have someone look into that, see if any are robust enough to work with.
Blazor seems to be a step in that direction. Blazor Hybrid Web Apps with .NET MAUI
But they already have Flutter experience, so perhaps that makes more sense.
Im not sure if .NET is even still needed if you go for a web-client (at least on the client side). The point of a web-client would be that it runs in a web-browser, or am I missing the point here?
But you want to use your existing back-end and GUI code as much as possible. You just want to image against a different window system, instead of OpenGL.
So, I’m thinking you can use the same standard .NET libraries, but have it imaged on the Web, as is done with iOS and Android. So, Web support for the front of .NET. They already have a WebView in MAUI, so you already have Web support on the back of .NET. That’s kind of useless if you didn’t start with a Web app. And MAUI does not have Linux support, except for Android, so perhaps that’s why you’re not seeing a native Linux client.
But… Again, ARC seems to suggest that Roon has invested in Flutter & Dart. Flutter does have native Web support. What’s more, it has migration tutorials for Xamarin.Forms developers, to move their apps to Flutter.
So still a client needed then. Does not run in a web-browser (Chrome, Firefox, …). So the whole effort of swapping-out OpenGL for the UI rendering just in the hopes it may make a “native” Linux client possible and using Wine obsolete. I’m not sure this is what the folks asking for a web based UI for Roon had in mind, it surely isn’t what I have in mind. I look at for example at PLEX and their web-GUI and think “Why does this not exist for Roon?”. As far as playback zones go, there is already the (dated) stand-alone Roon Bridge (also available for Linux), that then would become mandatory for permanent zones if the functionality is no longer part of an UI client package.
Yes, that’s right.
And Bridge is not available for iOS and Android. So you’d still have a native app which contained those bits, plus I suppose a WebView for the hypothetical Web GUI.
The current Roon Remote just plays to the systems standard audio interface. You don’t need a Roon Bridge to do that from a browser. A browser is perfectly able to play videos and audio tracks on it’s own.
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They don’t, Roon has its own custom gui framework
You mean, they don’t use MAUI, because they have their own GUI framework that works directly against OpenGL?
An old post, so things might have changed, or might do in the future…
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Thanks for pulling that up, Geoff.