chromium as a dekstop application container [closed]

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I would like to develop a desktop application but I want to use web technologies for the presentation layer. I don't want to use Adobe AIR for some reasons. So, I thought why not to include chromium with my web application installed. The final package will include a launcher which will launch a embedded jetty server and will open the included chromium bworser with the application directly. Do you think it is realizable? I'm not a fan of Firefox but, might it be a better alternative to chromium?

Answer 1

I think it's very doable... I would start with Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It takes care of the hard parts so you can focus on the core of your application. It (also) looks like the 'standard' these days. All these are using it as their desktop apps:

• Slack
• Atom (GitHub editor)
• Wordpress App
• Visual Studio Code (Powerful editor I'm using these days)
• WhatsApp (Their desktop app is using React and wrap with Electorn).

Last but not least, have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oFAr1YR-0 It contain all the information you need to start and build your app.

Answer 2

The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium and is used by the Atom editor and many other apps.

From the quick start docs:

Electron enables you to create desktop applications with pure JavaScript by providing a runtime with rich native (operating system) APIs. You could see it as a variant of the Node.js runtime that is focused on desktop applications instead of web servers.

This doesn't mean Electron is a JavaScript binding to graphical user interface (GUI) libraries. Instead, Electron uses web pages as its GUI, so you could also see it as a minimal Chromium browser, controlled by JavaScript.

To quickly install it as a development dependency:

npm install electron --save-dev