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Hydraulic Blog
Company blog · hydraulic.dev/blog · on HN as mike_hearnprogrammingsystems
Hydraulic Blog is the company blog at hydraulic.dev, writing about programming and systems. Since 2023, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “Deploying Apps with JCEF (Chromium Embedding Framework for Java)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-07-08, and you can follow it by feed.
45mentions?
5HN people?
2023–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked site is the product page for Conveyor, a tool that builds self-updating, signed desktop app packages for Electron, Flutter, JVM and native apps. Comments link to it as a product page rather than discussing writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Escape the browser with tools that make desktop development easy.
Most-linked posts?
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-20
- Deploying Apps with JCEF (Chromium Embedding Framework for Java)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-21
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-09
What Hacker News says?
My codebase has about 1500 files and is highly domain specific: it's a tool for shipping desktop apps[1] that handles all the building, packaging, signing, uploading etc for every platform on every OS simultaneously. It's written mostly in Kotlin, and to some extent uses a custom in-house build system. The rest of the build is Gradle, which is a notoriously confusing tool. The source tree also contains servers, comm…
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on “Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context”Submitted Shipping Electron apps from Linux CI with cloud signing services as a story · 1 points
HN discussionyour website makes like look like tesla is one of your clients https://www.hydraulic.dev/index.html
Comment linking /index.html
on “Dots: Always-on agents”Submitted Packaging Electron Apps with Conveyor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYep. For my own company I used a bare metal machine in Hetzner running Linux and a Windows VM along with a bunch of old MacBook Pros wired up in the home office for CI. It works, and it's cheap. A full CI run still takes half an hour on the Linux machine (the product [1] is a kind of build system for shipping desktop apps cross platform, so there's lots of file IO and cryptography involved). The Macs are by far the…
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on “Mercury: Ultra-fast language models based on diffusion”Submitted Delta Update Schemes Compared as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWell .... that's all true, until you want to deploy. Historically deploying desktop apps has been a pain in the ass. App stores barely help. That's why devs put up with the web's problems. Ad: unless you use Conveyor, my company's product, which makes it as easy as shipping a web app (nearly): https://hydraulic.dev/ You are expected to bring your own runtime. It can ship anything but has integrated support for Elect…
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on “Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole”Submitted Deploying Apps with JCEF (Chromium Embedding Framework for Java) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTake a look at https://www.hydraulic.dev/ >Build self-updating desktop app packages in minutes. Deploy to every OS from any OS. Platform native formats, fully signed and notarized. Electron, Flutter, JVM and native. And free: > Conveyor is free for open source projects.
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on “DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database”Usually Java apps come with Java these days, like how there's no independent way to run Electron apps, it just comes with the download of the app itself. There are tools that make it easy like jpackage and (toots my own horn) https://www.hydraulic.dev If you want to just quickly run a fat jar then any will work. "openjdk21" is fine. The Zulu variant comes with JavaFX which simplifies things if your app needs that.
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on “Java 22 Released”You can still get delta updates with Sparkle in an electron app. I am using it, and liking it a lot more than Electron Updater so far: https://www.hydraulic.dev
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on “A single line of code cost $8000”You can ship a fully signed and self-updating macOS app from Linux (or Windows) using my product Conveyor: https://hydraulic.dev/ It has built in support for Electron, JVM, Flutter and even native apps (although of course then you still have to compile the native binaries on macOS yourself). That also works the other way around. You can ship to Windows from Linux or macOS.
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on “Run macOS Software on Linux”Code signing is a trip alright. I make a build tool called Conveyor that simplifies all this way down for developers [1] as part of making shipping desktop apps a single command, and damn has it been a lot of work. First challenge: the tools provided by the OS developers only run on their OS and are of questionable quality, with bad error messages, poor documentation and unintuitive defaults. So I used a mix of open…
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on “A brief history of code signing at Mozilla”Our website https://hydraulic.dev/ covers the most important points but compared to jlink/jpackage: • Delta software updates without code changes. On Windows apps update in the background even when not running. • It can do web-style synchronous updates on app launch. • Can build for every platform from any platform. Linux cloud CI workers can be 10x cheaper than Mac workers, so this feature can save you a lot of mon…
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on “Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster”If your app is open source, or you're willing to buy a commercial tool, then you could try Conveyor from my company [1]. It will: - Find all the shared libraries in your JARs or configured app inputs (files in your build/source tree) - Sniff them to figure out what OS and CPU arch they are for - Bundle them into the right package for each platform that it makes, in the right place to be found by System.loadLibrary()…
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on “How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries”My experience of JS projects is that build tools are frequently ad-hoc. That is, there simply isn't a general build tool at all, but just a large pile of scripts calling under-documented libraries. Parallelization, caching and quite often even portability are just missing. To justify this statement consider this blog post I wrote a while ago about porting GitHub Desktop (an Electron app) from its prior build/deploym…
Comment linking /blog/8-packaging-electron-apps.html
on “Mill: A fast JVM build tool for Java and Scala”I faced similar problems some years ago, and frankly even if you use Electron the tools aren't that great. So I made a new tool (Conveyor) along with a company (Hydraulic): https://hydraulic.dev/ Conveyor is free to use for open source projects and works how you'd hope it works: it's a signup/account-free downloadable CLI tool. You run a single command from your dev laptop (or a cheap Linux CI worker) and it builds/…
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on “JReleaser: quick and effortless way to release your project”It can work. I have spent several years of my life making it work :) Obviously, on mobile you have app stores including enterprise app stores. On desktop you don't, or you do but they suck so people often don't want to use them. Making shipping desktop apps as easily as you can ship a web app is the goal of my company [1] and although it's always a work in progress it does get very close to that goal now. In particu…
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on “What Killed Innovation?”Squirrel is abandoned for years and still used anyway, often by people who don't realize it's abandoned. It's the default if you use the Electron toolchain, so that's why. It has serious design problems too, like it breaks Windows networks by bloating people's roaming home directories with dozens of independent copies of Chrome which then get backed up, copied around on login etc. Admins loathe it as the whole point…
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on “Microsoft is starting to open Windows Update up to any third-party app”Bit of a strange announcement. This already happened a long time ago. The MSIX engine that they mention uses a lot of the same technology as Windows Update and thus has many of the same features. I suspect what they mean is adding some more APIs to try and help non-Chrome non-MSIX apps benefit from those. MSIX is an interesting beast. My company sells a tool called Conveyor [1] that can create these packages from an…
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on “Microsoft is starting to open Windows Update up to any third-party app”So much effort, just to run Xcode remotely. For those of you who want to ship code to macOS from CI (e.g. Electron apps), you should check out my companies product at https://hydraulic.dev/ ... it lets you package, sign, notarize and upload self-updating Mac apps from any OS including Linux. Amongst other things it bundles Sparkle on the fly also, so you don't have to deal with Squirrel, and it can do the same trick…
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on “Tour of new custom M1 macOS runners racks with Christina Warren [video]”That's interesting. I've been looking for an angle on embedded Linux software updates for my deployment tool (currently limited to updating desktop and server apps only). When you say push, do you literally mean push or do you mean the devices would still pull updates on their own schedule where you get to control rollout percentages, channels, etc centrally? Mostly devices have to be assumed to be behind NAT, right…
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on “Systemd ParticleOS”ERP platforms that both run the world AND that have modern UX do exist. Take a look at Fusion, which covers all kinds of things from supply chain management, risk management, oil and gas industry specific stuff, banking specific stuff, you name it. https://www.oracle.com/erp/financial-close-product-tour/ https://www.oracle.com/erp/risk-management/#tour It's a bunch of web apps, basically. So the trite answer is, "wh…
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on “When will we fix the tools that run the world?”You can use a cloud HSM and some CAs offer cloud signing. We described some info about setting that up with our tool in this blog post (it talks about Electron but the instructions work for any kind of app): https://www.hydraulic.dev/blog/21-shipping-electron-apps-fro...
Comment linking /blog/21-shipping-electron-apps-from-ci-using-hsm-certificates.html
on “Sandboxing Python with Win32 App Isolation”You could also check out https://jpro.one which is a commercial solution but very impressive - and because rendering is server side, very fast as long as you're in the same continent as the server. The website is itself served by JPro. Of course you could also just distribute such apps as desktop apps... I will happily sell you a product that makes doing that easy :) https://hydraulic.dev/
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on “New Java to WASM GC Transpiler: Run Java in the Browser, No Plugin Required”MSIX gets conflated with UWP but these days they are separate. For a while, Microsoft tried to insist that Store apps were UWP apps, but UWP was basically a new OS platform and not really backwards compatible at all. By then though most Windows code had been written and wasn't being rewritten due to new development, so this attempt to get people off Win32 failed. Devs just rejected the store instead. Project Reunion…
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on “Windows is the malware compatibility layer for everything”Apple bundles compared to Flatpaks: • Both use reverse DNS to globally identify themselves, neither actually verifies DNS ownership. • Almost everything is a bundle, except for CLI apps. FlatPaks on the other hand are being auto-converted from previous packaging systems. • Bundles don't have dependencies. In theory they can, but in practice they never do. You depend on macOS/iOS as a unitary platform and bundles exp…
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on “Flatpak is not the future (2021)”I have a soft spot for JavaFX. I've used it for writing my own apps in the past and enjoyed the experience, so it's great to see it getting some big new features after a long period of focus on bug fixing and maturity. The rich text editor and the CSS transitions support should be big upgrades. You could do all the nice transitions you wanted before, but not using CSS syntax. There were also community-developed rich…
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on “JavaFX 24 Release”Sure. My company sells Conveyor, a CLI build tool for deploying desktop apps. https://hydraulic.dev/ (yes the domain name is silly, rebranding is on the todo list but customers come first). It has plenty of customers paying a $45/month subscription, some of which are big name companies that unfortunately don't like to have their logo put on the web page. But it's a CLI tool, and it's monetized. What do you want to k…
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on “Ask HN: Are there any CLI only tools that are monetised”It's not the way the OP did it, but there's a blog post here on how to ship apps using cloud signing with the Conveyor tool. The title talks about Electron but it should work for any kind of app (not tested with .net) https://hydraulic.dev/blog/21-shipping-electron-apps-from-ci...
Comment linking /blog/21-shipping-electron-apps-from-ci-using-hsm-certificates.html
on “The Windows installer of ImageMagick will no longer be signed”
