Native wrapper for webapps on OSX?

6 points·javajosh··6 comments

I'm looking for a webapp wrapper for OSX, kind of like PhoneGap, but for OSX not iOS. But there seems to be...nothing. Apache Cordova has a flashy website, but not very much information on what it can do or how to use it - and when I downloaded the bundle, read the readme.md, got sent back to a URL[1], OSX wasn't listed.

[1] http://docs.cordova.io/guide_getting-started_index.md.html

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Although not a complete "wrapper" it is very interesting:

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

Features:

Apps written in modern HTML5, CSS3, JS and WebGL.

Complete support for Node.js APIs and all its third party modules.

Good performance: Node and WebKit runs in the same thread: Function calls are made straightforward; objects are in the same heap and can just reference each other;

Easy to package and distribute apps.

Available on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows

If by "webapp wrapper" you actually mean a site-specific browser, there's Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/

Or, if you mean an SDK or framework for writing a native app using web technologies, I know of a few:

TideSDK: http://www.tidesdk.org/

AppJS, if you're not opposed to Node.js: http://appjs.org

Awesomium: http://awesomium.com/

I would stay away from frameworks that expose native APIs to JavaScript. Always use the best tool to do the job. Features such as dock integration, window management, main menu or filesystem access can be implemented in Obj-C/Cocoa with ~500 lines of code.

http://www.tidesdk.org/

https://github.com/maccman/macgap

Chrome can do this, right click chrome apps and select open as window.

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