WoAB

WoAB (Widgets on Actors Bridge) is a GUI microframework for combining the widgets toolkit GTK with the actors framework Actix. It helps with:

• Running the actors inside the GTK thread, allowing message handlers to interact with the widgets directly.
• Routing GTK signals through the asynchronous runtime, so that the code handling them can proceed naturally to interact with the actors.
• Mapping widgets and signals from Glade XML files to user types.

Refer to the docs for more explanation on how to use WoAB, and to the examples for a short demonstration.

Pitfalls

• When starting Actix actors from outside Tokio/Actix, woab::block_on must be used. This is a limitation of Actix that needs to be respected.
• dialog.run() must not be used - use woab::run_dialog instead.
• If an actor is created inside a gtk::Application::connect_activate, its started method will run after the activate signal is done. This can be a problem for methods like set_application that can segfault if they are called outside the activate signal. A solution could be to either do the startup inside connect_activate or use woab::route_signal to route the application's activate signal to the actor and do the startup in the actor's signal handler.
• woab::close_actix_runtime must be called after gtk::main(), or else Tokio will panic when GTK quits. If anyone knows how to automate it I'm open to suggestions.

License

Licensed under MIT license (LICENSE or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT))