Solutions for distributing HTML5 applications as desktop applications?
What are some solutions for distributing an HTML5 based desktop application?
I want to be able to distribute my HTML5 app as a standalone desktop application on Windows, OSX, and Linux. I would like for people to be able to double click my app icon shortcut to run my program.
I don't want the browser window showing at all, just my app. Is this possible?
Answer
HTML5 Apps in 2014
Frames by chrome/webkit
Electron (former Atom Shell)
Electron is an open source library developed by GitHub for building cross-platform desktop applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Electron accomplishes this by combining Chromium and Node.js into a single runtime and apps can be packaged for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (source)
The folks at github use this to provide their code editor Atom as an app. It has an documented api and a help channel on the official atom forums.
Node-Webkit, the most minimal approach
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.
Intel is behind this (?). I've been told it's very rough around the edges.
Brackets Shell, the sandbox of Adobes code editor (and base of Adobe Edge)
Note: The brackets-shell is only maintained for use by the Brackets project. Although some people have definitely had success using it as an app shell for other projects, we don't provide any official support for that and we haven't done a ton of work to make the app shell easily reusable. Many people will likely find it easier to use a project like node-webkit, which is more generic by design.
says the readme, but there are quite a lot of folks out there who did it nevertheless.
Frameworks + Tools
Adobe AIR, as another answers suggested.
The Adobe® AIR® runtime enables developers to package the same code into native apps for Windows and Mac OS desktops as well as iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and other Android™ devices, reaching the mobile app stores for over 500 million devices.
Sencha is a company which sells tools for app developers, including html5 app development and distribution.
Inactive approaches
Tide SDK (archived on 2015-07-12 at archive.org), beta version, discontinued on 12th Jul 2015
XULRunner from Mozilla may do the trick for you but adds some overhead.
app.js ended at 28th Oct 2013 for being surpassed by (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit)[node-webkit].
Because it is simple and yet powerful. Using AppJS you don't need to be worry about coding cross-platform or learning new languages and tools. You are already familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. What is better than this stack for application development? Beside, AppJS uses Chromium at the core so you get latest HTML 5 APIs working. So and focus on the task your application should do.
Mozilla Prism is decomissioned, their slugline was:
Bringing web applications to your Desktop
Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.