Hipe: HTML Interface Pipe
A display server for native applications, from desktops to embedded devices.
Hipe is...
Taking the DOM native.
The Document Object Model is the rendering and layout paradigm used by the web. Hipe makes it the display language of native applications.
Entirely free.
Free software from top to bottom, with a client library that any application, commercial or open source, can use.
Less tangled than a browser.
All the layout, typography and multimedia of a browser engine, with none of the scripts, page loading or network baggage.
Lean and responsive.
No browser to bundle and no runtime dependencies: Hipe applications link one small library and start instantly.
Secure by design.
Hipe applications can't log or manipulate each other's on-screen elements, nor even connect to a Hipe environment without a security credential.
...a better display server.
Native display servers give applications a surface to draw on, and leave layout, text and widgets to whichever toolkit each one uses. The web, meanwhile, has the most capable layout and styling system there is, but desktop applications can only have it by bundling a whole browser.
Hipe brings the two together. It is a display server for Linux and Unix-like operating systems whose display language is the web's Document Object Model: HTML tag elements and CSS styling. An application doesn't draw pixels and doesn't send pages. It connects to the display server and builds its interface out of tags, then changes them as it runs and is told when the user interacts with them.
Under the hood is hipecore, a display engine derived from WebKit with the web browser taken out. There is no JavaScript, no network access and no page loading: the parts of a browser engine that exist to fetch and run things from elsewhere are gone, leaving its layout and rendering. What remains is small, fast to start, and has far less to go wrong.
Hipe is something new. Applications are written for it, in C or C++ or anything that can speak its instruction protocol, and they interact with the display server to manipulate individual tags directly, in real time. A framing manager is an ordinary Hipe application that arranges the others on screen, so a complete desktop environment of your own design, or the whole interface of an embedded device, can be built entirely from Hipe instructions.
Where to start
- Find out what all the hype's about.
- See Hipe running on the Screenshots page.
- How Hipe works, and the rest of the documentation. The whole manual is also available as a single page.
- Download Hipe and try the sample applications.