RE: Request for feedback: Alternate desktop runtime architecture

As you may know, the most troublesome part of pgAdmin 4 has been the desktop runtime application, which has relied on QtWebKit and QtWebEngine (of various origins and versions) to render the UI as part of the Qt framework.

This has caused performance issues, rendering issues with remote desktop sessions, keyboard navigation issues and more. It probably accounts for 25% or more of the bugs reports we deal with.

Unfortunately, whilst there are alternatives to Qt for this purpose, none that we've found are mature enough for our purposes, and would require a significant amount of effort to add the features we would need to support pgAdmin.

I've therefore been experimenting with another approach in which pgAdmin is rendered in a regular web browser when running in desktop mode. Like some other similar applications, a server process is launched and lives in the system tray, from where it can be shutdown at any time, or new windows opened. When it is first started, it will launch a browser window to render pgAdmin automatically. If additional instances are launched, the previously running instance will be re-used to avoid wasting resources.

This is a proof of concept at the moment, for which I would appreciate any feedback. Windows and Mac builds can be found here:

https://developer.pgadmin.org/~dpage/runtime-revamp/

and the GIT branch can be found here:

https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=pgadmin4.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/runtime-revamp

Thanks!

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