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Comment by fat0wl | Hacker News Reader

I know everybody is tired of these Javascript POC apps but I think it's a testament to the fact that it's so easy to implement webapps vs desktop stuff, and can perform functionally well.

If Google released a version of Chrome that could camouflage itself as a desktop app (browser-based UI over C++ functionality, but that browser appears as it's own app rather than another damn open tab) I think we would see a flourishing of better desktop apps rather than just everything-you-can-think-of-stuck-in-a-browser.

EDIT: Funny I got downvoted because the responses that follow are probably the greatest amount of insight/interest on the whole page. The rest of the comments are just whining about how this isn't a perfect Winamp emulation lol.

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I don't know of a good framework to cache an app in localstorage so its available offline transparently. IE, you want it so once someone runs your "app" once, and adds it as an app (a .desktop file, whatever the equivalent in Windows is, etc) so that it only ever pulls the pages from the network when an update is found.

heh i don't want to build an APP!! that's kinda the point, lol.

i'm not an app developer. i make audio stuff with machine learning tools & I'm a web dev to pay the bills. But in this case all i really want is to build a desktop application (c++,java,whatever) and have a browser-based UI... but not have it appear as a browser tab.

Have you seen the Chrome apps platform?

http://developer.chrome.com/apps/about_apps.html

It's pretty damned close to what you're asking for.

yeah this is close.... i just wish that it could be a layer on top of C++ or Java rather than js only. The point is that I want to make an app as powerful as a desktop app, just with this type of UI.

If you could run a c++/java app in the background and make RPCs to it from browser events, that would be closer...

How about node-webkit?

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

It's basically Chromium on top of nodejs. Then you can mix your C++ code with nodejs via addons.

http://nodejs.org/api/addons.html

Yeah this is the closest so far -- a fleshed out version of the RPC avenue.

Thanks so much for the responses, these are really great ideas.

I believe Chrome apps can use Native Client, if you want to message between a C/C++ module and your web application. And of course there are increasingly mature tools for compiling C++ to some subset of JavaScript. https://developers.google.com/native-client/

What you just described is pretty much Silverlight. It can do out of browser stuff.

Eh I don't want to program Silverlight though....... I'd rather just use html/css/js for UI.

Likewise. I wasn't saying that :)

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