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Comment by arturadib | Hacker News Reader

The hardest part of all of this is getting a runtime that builds/installs seamlessly across platforms. I just did an 'npm install appjs' as per docs, and it failed (Mac).

I myself have gone through great lengths to create a similar (minus Webkit) runtime for Mac, Windows, and Linux:

https://github.com/arturadib/node-qt

https://github.com/arturadib/node-five

Despite all my efforts there are edge cases where it simply won't install/build.

Keep up the good work though -- this is a much needed project. (Bear in mind too that Mozilla and other companies are coming out with their own runtimes for web apps, so such projects will likely be rendered obsolete by them).

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Why are you trying to reinvent the wheel?

I already mentioned XULRunner here, and I´d suggest you have a look at it. There are a few applications you may have heard about using it https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XULRunner_Hall_of_Fame

There's no wheel being reinvented. XULRunner is based on XUL, which makes it fundamentally different from the goal of above projects (that is, to use HTML technologies alone to build 'native' apps).

Some of us at Mozilla Labs have tried to fill this gap through the Chromeless project (https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless), but we've stopped working on it in favor of a more general runtime for web apps (that's what I was talking about in the last sentence: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/WebRT).

The very fact that XULRunner/Chromeless didn't take off like PhoneGap did in the mobile arena for example is evidence that there's room for innovation in this space.

Happy to elaborate on this, but only if you promise you'll be nicer :)

I´m sorry if my comment could be read hostile, it was not intentional.

But what I don´t understand is what more are you trying to achieve that cannot be done in XUL with a browser tag (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL/browser), and where you can stick to vanilla html/js/css, if XUL is not an option?

ugh. have you ever developed stuff in XUL? It's not a great system. It's also pretty ancient, so there's probably cruft there support old XUL applications built in 2002.

I think the main problem is that XUL is like HTML, but not. So people's brains are already wired to understand html, but when there's something that looks identical to it, but has it's own set of quirks, it takes a lot of time getting used to. It's as if someone took C++ and changed just enough stuff so that you wouldn't notice it until you tried to run it.

How many html tags do you recognize here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Reference ?

Lots of the tags are somewhat historical because css wasn't as powerful back in 2002 as it is today. Most people starting to hack XUL won't know the difference between a bbox and a deck tag.

I admit not having worked extensively with XULRunner. Maybe 4 years ago was it, but I know that html can be used via the html namespace https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Tutorial/Adding_HTML_El...

It looks quirky, but I thought the most important part of using web technologies is to use Javascript and CSS; which can be applied over XUL elements just like HTML.

Also compared to the current project it is vastly superior in terms of features and functionality that can be tapped into with Javascript.

There is space for improvement, like with most software, but it is in fact a tested technology already.

It failed to install on your Mac because there is no port for Mac at the moment:)

Good Work!

  https://github.com/arturadib/node-qt

It's a valiant effort, but I wonder if anyone has a use for the Qt API to draw text on a window? All you really need to do is get WebKit working and get NodeJS to be able to open WebKit windows -- that would be infinitely more usable to web developers that might want to build native apps using JavaScript.

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