Which Toolkit to develop Mac OSX/Windows Daemon service

Question

I need to develop a daemon service which also has presence in System Tray. The system tray icon allows users to customize/access some options through right click menu. It might open a window as well manage those options in a better way.

The app would mostly be communicating with a RESTful service, posting and downloading files.

Now I know that for any daemon service, it needs to be native. However we don't have the luxury to maintain 3 different dev pipelines, specially since the app is experimental(but might land up in hands of users)

I have experience in Java/Scala, followed by C++/Python/JS. I would prefer java/Scala (existing codebase) but open to frameworks in other languages.

I was thinking of doing a scala based app with swing for windowing, but it is not pretty. Any ideas?

Answer 1

We have an App, same base code, running on Windows, OSX and Linux (with system tray) using these two set of components:

• The Tanuki Java Service Wrapper to handle the lifecycle of the app. It also allows installing the component as a "native" windows service. Version 3.2.3 is under LGPL if that helps.

• The Java 6 java.awt.SystemTray which is supported on most platforms. On OSX, we use a modified version of macify to implement OSX specific gimmicks like doc icons

Answer 2

You could go with JavaFX and the ScalaFX bindings. They look to be very actively maintained, and the syntax seems pretty clean. Only trouble is that it seems to have poor support for using the system tray - see this discussion for details and some workarounds.

Answer 3

You can use Real Studio to create a Windows Service and OS X/Linux daemons. Real Studio creates native apps for Windows, OS X and Linux.