Turn Node Applications into Executables | Hacker News Reader

Turn Node Applications into Executables

jxcore.com

87 pointsrobry9 comments

For GUI apps, I've found Atom Shell (https://github.com/atom/atom-shell) quite convenient as a HTML app wrapper. You can embed Angular.js and Bootstrap to create a working prototype application very quickly. Node.js modules can be require()'d straight into Angular controllers or services.

There is also node-webkit [1]

[1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Looking at the features list, I see, "Complete support for Node.js APIs and all its third party modules."

Does this mean the JS code on your HTML pages has no sandbox between itself and the OS?

Also, how does this compare to QtWebKit [1][2]? I like the idea of blending HTML with native GUI components in a desktop app, or even having a "lite" web only version, become a "full" version when run on the desktop and share as much code as possible.

[1] https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKit

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271511

I was playing with nexe[1] a couple of months ago. I didn't know about JXCore. Now I see they support multithreading and other performance benefits. Amazing!

[1] https://github.com/crcn/nexe

The post speaks about HTML but as far as I can see this does not contain a rendering component similar to what node-webkit does. Am I right?

I think they mean its just bundling all your resources into the executable.

The bundled executable could just be a web server that serves HTML files to your browser on localhost:8080...

The title was misleading to me. It appears this project packages up javascript + runtime + interpreter into an executable artifact. Does not compile to javascript to native exe. I reviewed the docs breifly, please correct me if that's wrong!

The actual article's title is "Turn Node Applications into Executables". This tool doesn't turn the JS code into native code, it just packages it up along with a JS run-time.

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