Meta Refresh 2014

This talk will help you understand the different frameworks to run your HTML/JS/CSS app as a first-class desktop application.

Outline

RIA (Rich internet applications) traditionally run inside a browser environment. This provides various benefits like always-up-to-date code, a no-install experience among others.

But what if your application is more important and it needs a full-fledged desktop application for a high degree of access. The benefits of running your RIA on the desktop are:

1. More access to resources like filesystem, sound, etc.
2. Ability to run native code like C++ (for some frameworks) to do heavy lifting and display in JavaScript.
3. Make it easy to run for users who don’t update their browsers, and cannot grok the concept of a web application.

This talk won’t be an evangelizing session about the benefits of moving your apps on a desktop, but real-world practical advice on what to do if you want to. The structure of the talk will be:

1. I take a sample demo app which I’ll port on every platform I’m testing.
2. I present whatever pitfalls and difficulty I had with different systems.
3. I summarize the amount of code/time it took to convert a web app into desktop app with each platform.

The platforms that I intend to cover are:

• Chrome Embedded Framework
• Chrome packaged apps
• Webkit GTK+
• Adobe AIR
• Appjs
• Tide SDK
• node-webkit
• QT’s QHtml5Application
• HeX
• Bellite

Speaker bio

I am the co-founder of RazorFlow. We build a HTML5 Dashboard Framework which lets you quickly develop cross-device dashboards.

I know a thing or two about JavaScript.