nw.js

Was recently looking for information on building desktop apps with Electron or NW.js. Found a few useful links regarding source code protection. In short: Documented method is v8 snapshots. They are compiled code, run slower and are not cross platform. * Using v8 snapshots - https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/Protect-JavaScript-source... * Electron thread about source code protection - https://github.com/atom/electron/issues/3041 The second link has a lot of comments with useful information. One of them mentions that v8 snapshot format is documented and also that the actual code is shipped with the snapshot for future optimizations. nw.js just removes the sourcecode from the snapshot. I'm curious if there is any reliable means of source code protection for Electron or NW.js apps.

Just one click through and you arrive at the README: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js (the website is clearly, unfortunately, geared towards people in the know). nwjs (node-webkit formerly) is a Chromium wrapper that lets you deploy web apps as desktop apps, simple as that.

You simply zip the files and rename to dot nw. Then the first time the user runs the file, the user needs to select "open with nw.exe". ref: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/How-to-package-and-distri... You probably want to include an "install" script that: * Download and install nwjs if it doesn't exist * Make the "package" open with nw.exe * optionally: Create a shortcut to the "package" on the desktop * optionally: Set a icon for the shortcut Or instruct the user on how to do it. Many files work that way, that you have to select a program to open it with, so the user probably already knows how to do it.

Yep, nw.js runs on io.js as of the 0.12 release in January. Here's a giant list of people using it: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companie... One of the more notable ones is Popcorn Time, the stupid easy to use movie torrent client.

Well, nw.js[1] to be precise. It is a pretty small application. [1] https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/

I am kind of disappointed in the naming of this. There's another project named Node-WebKit: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/tree/master It allows you to build a native app using node and webkit. Reading the name of this project got my hopes up, thinking I was going to have the option of using Firefox instead of Webkit as my rendering engine. Oh well.

"NW.js appears to be some sort of "break" from node-webkit, and the copy on the main site seems to suggest that it is an entirely new project" It's seems that it's the same project. The GitHub page says: "node-webkit is renamed NW.js" https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js

On the GitHub page it says: "node-webkit is renamed NW.js" https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js

Honestly, I wonder why they don't bother to put an example on the main page. Looking at the github repo of the project [0] (which doesn't have a folder "example" as well), it says: node-webkit is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js. You can write native apps in HTML and JavaScript with node-webkit. It also lets you call Node.js modules directly from the DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all Web technologies. So I suppose it's about desktop apps ("native" must mean "desktop"). [0] https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js