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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I reallllly want someone to repackage how NW.js works to be able to ship just the app files, and have NW.js work like the JVM. Super tired of having 20 different instances of webkit

Very full guide though, down to release.

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I for one do not. Desktop/laptop storage drives are huge now, RAM is plentiful, internet connections are fast. Time spent debugging horrific deranged multiple JVM setup nightmares, however, is as expensive as ever.

Maybe someone should explore the concept of "docker for JVMs/WebKits". Or - to be more precise - aufs for multiple versions of big runtime. Although I suspect that disk space savings may not be that good, and that will not solve RAM problem either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Wouldn't this be like installing Chrome then and installing Chrome apps?

Or even better, use the platform's native webview.

Yes please! I’m not a fan of wrapper apps, but for the ones that I have no choice in using (Slack for instance) it’d be great if they used the copy of WebKit included with OS X, preferably through WKWebView. While web engines are always going to be mammoths, at least OS X bundled webkit is specifically optimized for the OS and tends to be easier on the battery than Chromium-based stuff.

Try tint: https://github.com/trueinteractions/tint2/

I have to say Tint is a great tool to develop apps with, particularly for binding a node runtime to native (Objective-C and .NET/COM) objects.

I've been using it for the past several months working on two fairly large-scale apps. Thanks Trevor and team.

The thing NW.js offers is access to node.js libs through JavaScript. This isn't available through the native webview (for good reason! Very much a security risk)

Most embeddable webviews allow binding additional methods that call into native though. This is how cordova works, in fact. If you're restricting access to local html/js, it shouldnt be any different to nw/electron from a security perspective.

Edit: looks like the tint framework linked above actually isolates the webview from the node runtime. Nice.

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