What you should know before starting node-webkit

I like node-webkit.<p>One of the ironies about the &quot;Write once, Run many&quot; mantra for HTML5 is that it&#x27;s mostly applied to phones, where the runtime presents numerous challenges. On the desktop, however, HTML5 runtimes are faster and more feature-rich, so this is really where the portable aspect of HTML5 can excel. Adding Node to the mix makes it powerful too, going beyond regular browser capabilities.

We used node-webkit with a portable launcher (to contain registry entries and keep settings with the app on Windows) to make 2048 Portable over at PortableApps.com: <a href="http://portableapps.com/apps/games/2048-portable" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;portableapps.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;games&#x2F;2048-portable</a><p>It was a bit of an experiment to see how well it worked... and IF it worked. We compressed some of node-webkit with UPX to shrink it down without compressing all of it and sacrificing performance. It works pretty well though is a bit buggy. We already have a couple web games that are planning to use it to reach a wider audience (since we have a few millions users).

I&#x27;ve built a few apps using node-webkit for myself and, being a web developer, found it pretty awesome. One of the challenges that I think atom-shell handles better is background tasks&#x2F;jobs. In node-webkit, my understanding is if you want to be able to background tasks using a node worker (not a webworker), then you have to bundle another node runtime with your app and use node&#x27;s execute&#x2F;spawn. This works OK, but bundling another version of node is kind of a pain. atom-shell works this way out of the box which is awesome if you need it.<p>Both projects are great ways of developing apps using web technologies though.

I&#x27;ve tried migrating a pair of fairly lightweight desktop applications to node-webkit from Realbasic&#x2F;Xojo (which is essentially a cross-platform Visual Basic, only nicer) with some success (in once case the new application is far faster, while I haven&#x27;t finished the second, but so far so good).<p>This is the first (simpler) application (really of interest only to Cheetah 3D users).<p><a href="http://loewald.com/c3dbook/Misc-Resources/C3D-Buddy/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;loewald.com&#x2F;c3dbook&#x2F;Misc-Resources&#x2F;C3D-Buddy&#x2F;</a><p>There&#x27;s no attempt to produce a &quot;native&quot; UI (indeed, it&#x27;s not using any frameworks) but it works very well.<p>I&#x27;d like to see a node-webkit-based IDE for creating node-webkit applications (I&#x27;ve considered trying to write one, but I do NOT have the time).

Is node-webkit going to be renamed to node-blink at some point? It seems misleading to continue using WebKit in the name when it&#x27;s not been based on WebKit for quite some time.

I&#x27;ve done a bit of node-webkit but I what I really didn&#x27;t like was the speed at which a node-webkit app launches itself. It&#x27;s pretty slow.