Open-Source HTML5 Terminal Emulator To Support X11

[riskable]

Convenient upgrades too

With a GUI that looks an works the same on all platforms without having to change the code?

Not only that but you only ever have to upgrade the software in one place. You never have to deploy updates to clients, deal with proprietary updaters, etc.

I also wrote Gate One so you could stop & start the gateone.py process and still be able to resume everyone's sessions. This works for the new X11 feature as well. After installing an update:

/etc/init.d/gateone stop
# Everyone's browser reports Gate One disconnected
/etc/init.d/gateone start
# Within five seconds everyone's browser reconnects and it resumes where they left off

Five seconds of down time for maintenance is pretty good, yeah?

Of course, in the real world you'd just do

/etc/init.d/gateone restart

to save yourself some typing.

[sarmad]

Also with Asm.JS we can get near native performance (right now about half but will get better with ES6)

Nope, not true and never going to be true. Yes, it's going to be near native performance of apps that are written in a dynamic way (dynamic objects, duck typing, garbage collection, etc) but that's different from writing your app in C++ with static objects and high performance memory management.

[Pajn]

I don't know about vanilla Java, but Python works just fine on my Android device.

With a GUI that looks an works the same on all platforms without having to change the code?

[riskable]

I am the author

Hey there... I'm the author of Gate One. If you guys have any specific questions about it or the new X11 support just ask away.

[Daktyl198]

This is about running everything inside the browser, including X11 itself. Look at the video to see how it's all running inside the browser. So, in theory you should be able to run this on any HTML5 capable browser even if it's not running on Linux, and that's why SSH and network transparency had to be implemented inside the emulator itself. It's basically designed to allow you to remote access another machine from any browser.

ooooooookay. Yeah, I missed that at first. I thought the terminal window was an actual window and it was just using QtWebKit or something to be written in HTML5...
That makes much more sense now

[TheBlackCat]

Java, Python and other languages that used to be cross-platform isn't no more (They don't run on mobile phones and tablets).
HTML5 (with friends) is the only true cross-platform environment we have.

I don't know about vanilla Java, but Python works just fine on my Android device.

[dh04000]

Will this be a binary that just runs in a webbrowser using html5? Or can this literally be a website (ie: terminal.org or something) that you can in place of opening a terminal on your machine?

[Delgarde]

Am I the only one who feels HTML has become an operating system? A slow and memory intensive operating system that is?

Depends... when you say "operating system", what do you mean?

[Pajn]

Am I the only one who feels HTML has become an operating system? A slow and memory intensive operating system that is?

Well

Java, Python and other languages that used to be cross-platform isn't no more (They don't run on mobile phones and tablets).
HTML5 (with friends) is the only true cross-platform environment we have.

Also with Asm.JS we can get near native performance (right now about half but will get better with ES6)

[sarmad]

Can somebody tell me why a terminal emulator has to support network transparency? Or SSH? I thought that gnome-terminal or xfce4-terminal were terminal emulators...
(And that the SSH support came from the installed ssh)

Also, it says it "doesn't require browser plugins" which confuses me as well. I can write an HTML5 app separate from a browser in a multitude of different ways, so how does a browser fit into this??

This is about running everything inside the browser, including X11 itself. Look at the video to see how it's all running inside the browser. So, in theory you should be able to run this on any HTML5 capable browser even if it's not running on Linux, and that's why SSH and network transparency had to be implemented inside the emulator itself. It's basically designed to allow you to remote access another machine from any browser.