RIA application development on linux platform [closed]

Question

I am building a web based RIA application using web technologies including Rails based server side code, and client side based on HTML,CSS,JQuery and plugins etc.

I am looking forward to creating a standalone cross platform application using the same code-base (I do not want to rewrite the application UI in Qt or some other language/library).

Also, I dont want that clients should have to set up a web server to view the content. The application is heavily ajax based and communicates with the restful backend. The desktop client should be able to have exactly the same functionality with additional provision of local storage and synchronization of data.

I wish to carry out the entire development process on linux. Now that Adobe has stopped supporting AIR on linux, I am not taking that as a viable candidate. I have been looking into Mozilla prism, its almost what I am looking for, except for the fact that it does not seem to have any provision for local storage or interaction with local filesystem.

It would be preferable if the solution is open source. My entire codebase from bottom up is based on open source technologies and as far as possible I would like to keep it that way.

Also, I am comfortable hand-coding my application and features like, integration with existing IDEs, GUI development environment, powerful application builder wizards etc. are not necessary requirements.

I have been suggested that it is possible to have a webkit component embedded in a Qt application and carry out what I want, but I am unable to locate proper resources that can help me do that. I am familiar with Java and C plus plus, so writing additional wrapper code in some other language is not a major hurdle.
If somehow local storage facility can be added to prism, that would be a highly preferred solution.

Also creating a plugin for google-chrome/chromium is a possible alternative. How does it compare to above options.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

At the moment AppJS ( http://appjs.org ) seems to be the most robust contender designed exactly around these same principles.

Another alternative might be a GTK-webkit based solution ( http://webkitgtk.org ) .

[Update:Aug 2013]

Multiple other alternatives are available as well :

• TideSDK

  TideSDK is community based offshoot of the immensely popular Titanium SDK. While the project is very promising, last I checked there were major hiccups running the developer tools on linux.

• Node-webkit

  This interesting project provides seamless interoperability between Node.js and Webkit. The end result is that you can start developing an application just like you would write a web-page with the additional ability to call any built-in or third-party node-modules. CommonJS modules just work in the browser context. The project is intel sponsored and I have personally found it very simple to use and productive.