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Comment by nozzlegear | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to add a shoutout to WinJS for posterity, with which I built a Windows 8 app that I had published to the Windows Store for a brief period of time. Then they open-sourced the UI part of WinJS and decided it was just a web framework instead of an officially supported method for building Windows apps iirc, which was the end of my foray into the Windows store.

https://github.com/winjs/winjs

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I was actually part of a team at Barnes & Noble.com which tried to use WinJS for a serious application. (We were previously using Chromium Embedded Framework, or our own hand-rolled WebKit integration, for the desktop e-reader.)

It didn't go great. I gave a talk about it. https://youtu.be/HySQR0t_7CI?si=5sfKbb-7u-qqD65R . (Be gentle to my 2012 self's speaking skills.)

I have a WinJS book somewhere, from Microsoft Press.

When it was announced at PDC, they only talked about WinJS and nothing else, the folks of .NET Rocks have a few shows where they mention they thought .NET was done, and they needed to refocus into something else.

The show where they interview Miguel de Icaza they go into this.

> for posterity

Anyone remember this one?

Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281

The CD is available on Archive.org

I have the book (and CD) on my shelf above my machines in my home office. I vaguely recall buying this at Costco, around the same time I bought the 4 volume Microsoft Press C++ series (for dirt cheap, at the time) from Costco.

MS Press used to publish some amazing references. I have a LOT of 'em.

Of course, the reason for the lawsuit, and redoing Ext-VOS ideas with Cool instead of J++, later renamed to C#.

Ironically, Microsoft nowadays not only has their OpenJDK based distro, they even host Java conferences.

If you want JS, isn’t react-native-windows an option?

It probably is now, but I don't think it was at the time. This was back in the early Windows 8 era, when apps were called "Metro" – 2012 to 2015 I think? I'm primarily a .NET dev by trade, but I wanted to try something different with WinJS so invested time in learning that.

WinJS was a bit different, where your app was genuinely just a bundle of JavaScript and a UWP host process dealt with the rendering. (No Electron-esque to deliver with your app) Made for some tiny, succinct apps.

I am once again stating react-native-windows, the key part being native. It doesn't have anything to do with Electron.

This is why I said Electron-esque. I meant you didn't need a wrapper or renderer of some kind. You literally didn't bundle anything executable, your app was a ZIP of JS files & images that Windows spawned a host process for.

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