A Bottles program developers, which offers an interface for simplifying the installation, configuration, and launch of Windows applications on Linux, have published information about the development of the Bottles Next initiative aimed at completely overhauling the architecture and codebase of the project. It is noted that the existing monolithic application written in Python with a GTK interface does not allow for many ideas, such as support for macOS, limits capabilities, and leads to issues that cannot be resolved without radically changing the architecture.
The new architecture implies dividing the application into three separate components: a client with a graphical interface implementation, a server with application launch logic and management of Wine prefixes, and an agent running under Wine that interacts with the Windows API. Initially, it was planned to use web technologies (Electron and VueJS) for the client’s implementation, but szerver to write it in Go, but the created prototypes and the community's rejection of the idea to transition to the Electron engine prompted the developers to abandon this idea.
Ultimately, it was decided to use Rust for the development of the client and a szerver build the graphical interface based on the libcosmic framework. Libcosmic is used in the COSMIC desktop environment and is an extension of the iced library, providing functions for creating graphical applications and applets. The development applies a reactive programming model and architecture familiar to developers acquainted with the Elm declarative interface building language. For rendering, engines based on Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+ can be used.
It is noted that developers would have preferred to use Go, but had to abandon it due to the lack of quality toolkits for user interface development. Besides the new simplified interface, there are plans to keep the familiar classic interface as an option. The agent's code will be written in C# and .NET, due to the necessity of running the WineBridg service in a Windows environment formed by Wine. The container for testing the initial prototype of Bottles Next, written in Rust, is planned to be released in a few weeks. Currently, only the simplest demo version is available.
Forrás: opennet.ru
