CEF2go

Table of contents:

• Introduction
• Compatibility
• Binary examples
• Help
• Support Development
• Forks worth a look
• Communication between Go and Javascript
• Getting started on Windows
• Getting started on Linux
• Getting started on Mac OS X
• Built a cool app?
• Familiar with Python or PHP?

Introduction

CEF2go is an open source project founded by Czarek Tomczak in 2014 to provide Go bindings for the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). CEF2go can act as a GUI toolkit, allowing you to create an HTML 5 based GUI in your application. Or you can provide browser capabilities to your application.

Currently the CEF2go example creates just a simple window with the Chromium browser embedded. You can set a few options for your application like the cache directory. More advanced bindings are in plans, and that includes javascript bindings and callbacks, so that you can have bidirectional communication between Go and Javascript in a native way. Though, it is already possible to communicate with Go from Javascript, see the "Communication between Go and Javascript" section further down this page.

CEF2go is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, see the LICENSE file.

Compatibility

Supported platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX.

CEF2go was tested and works fine with Go 1.2 / Go 1.3.3. In the case of Windows (32 and 64 bits) it was tested and works fine with Go 1.8.3.

Binary examples

The binary examples provided here use CEF 3 branch 1750 (Chrome 33 beta channel as of build time).

Windows example: releases/tag/v0.10

Linux example: releases/tag/v0.11

Mac OSX example: releases/tag/v0.12

Help

Having problems or questions? Go to the CEF2go Forum. Please do not use Issue Tracker for asking questions.

See the auto generated docs for the following packages:

• cef
• cocoa
• gtk
• wingui

Support development

Both code contributions and Paypal donations are welcome.

Thanks to those who have made a Paypal donation:

• David Witten

Forks worth a look

• fromkeith/cef2go
  • Adds support for client handlers (eg. Display, LifeSpan, Request, Resource, Scheme, Download).
  • Exposes new objects (eg. Browser, Frame, Request, Response).
  • Tested only on Windows.
• paperlesspost/cef2go
  • Adds suport for a few client handlers including Render handler (off-screen rendering to a raw pixel buffer).
  • Implements V8 callbacks for native communication from Javascript to Go.
  • Tested only on Linux.

Communication between Go and Javascript

For now to make communication between Go and javascript possible you have to run an internal http server and communicate using XMLHttpRequests in javascript. See the http_server_windows.go example that embeds both a http server and a Chromium browser in a standalone application. To run it type "build.bat http_server". The http server is listening at 127.0.0.1:54007, thus it is not accessible from the outside, it can be accessed only from the machine it is running on.

Getting started on Windows 32-bit

1. Install Go 32-bit.

2. Install mingw 32-bit and add C:\MinGW\bin to PATH. You can install mingw using mingw-get-setup.exe. Select packages to install: "mingw-developer-toolkit", "mingw32-base", "msys-base". CEF2go was tested and works fine with GCC 5.3.0. You can check gcc version with "gcc --version".

3. Download CEF 3 branch 3071 revision 1640 binaries: cef_binary_3.1750.1590_windows32.7z
   Copy Release/* to cef2go/Release
   Copy Resources/* to cef2go/Release

4. Run build.bat (or "build.bat noconsole" to get rid of the console window when running the final executable)

5. You might need to help your linker find libcef.dll

Getting started on Windows 64-bit

1. Install Go 64-bit.

2. Install mingw 64-bit and add the bin folder to PATH. You can install mingw using mingw-w64-install. Select x86_64 as your architecture. CEF2go was tested and works fine with GCC 7.1.0. You can check gcc version with "gcc --version".

3. Download CEF 3 branch 3071 revision 1640 binaries: cef_binary_3.1750.1590_windows32.7z
   Copy Release/* to cef2go/Release
   Copy Resources/* to cef2go/Release

4. Run build.bat (or "build.bat noconsole" to get rid of the console window when running the final executable)

5. You might need to help your linker find libcef.dll

Getting started on Linux

1. These instructions work fine with Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit. On Ubuntu 13/14 libudev.so.0 is missing and it is required to create a symbolic link to libudev.so.1. For example on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit run this command: cd /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ && sudo ln -sf libudev.so.1 libudev.so.0.

2. Install CEF dependencies:
   sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libgtkglext1-dev

3. Download CEF 3 branch 1750 revision 1604 binaries: cef_binary_notcmalloc_3.1750.1604_linux64.zip
   Copy Release/* to cef2go/Release

4. Run "make" command.

Getting started on Mac OS X

1. These instructions work fine with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. May also work with other versions, but were not tested.

2. Install Go 32-bit. Tested with Go 1.2-386 for OSX 10.8. CEF binaries for OSX 64-bit are still experimental, that's why we're using 32-bit. Though you can try building with CEF 64-bit, download binaries from cefbuilds.com.

3. Install command line tools (make is required) from:
   https://developer.apple.com/downloads/
   (In my case command line tools for Mountain Lion from September 2013)

4. Install XCode (gcc that comes with XCode is required). Use the link above. In my case it was XCode 4.6.3 from June 2013.

5. Download CEF 3 branch 1750 revision 1625 binaries for 32-bit: releases/tag/v0.12
   Copy the cef2go.app directory to cef2go/Release.

6. Run "make" command.

Built a cool app?

Built a cool app using CEF2go and would like to share info with the community? Talk about it on the CEF2go Forum.

Familiar with Python or PHP?

The author of CEF2go is also working on CEF bindings for other languages. For Python see the CEF Python project. For PHP see the PHP Desktop project.