[cbuq]

I believe these frameworks are very cool and web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future.

My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world.

Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?

[WorldMaker]

All of the technologies here, including Photon, are open sourced under commercial-friendly open source licenses (the MIT license being most common in this space.)

Electron is a "competitor" to NW.js (previously known as NodeWebkit). It was developed by Github for their commercial and non-commercial applications.

There should be no concerns about using these things in commercial projects. But you don't have to take my word for it, all of these projects have open source repositories, most of them on GitHub, and you can check their LICENSE files for yourself.

[0942v8653]

> web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future

Can you expand on this? I'm interested in your viewpoint because the general consensus on HN seems to be that webapps are better off as webapps and desktop apps are better off as desktop apps—being in the browser seems to be good enough for most webapps, and when packaging something as a desktop app there are little quirks that mess it up.

[cbuq]

As giancarlostoro mentioned, it's mostly about the web ecosystem; web apps have an amazing number of opensource projects to take advantage of. I see a huge benefit from being cross-platform (windows/osx/linux/android/ios/even blackberry) and only having to develop and maintain one ui. Some examples I can think of are Spotify, Atom, Thunderbird. Web technologies are also being standardized more than many desktop technologies have been; - HTML5 (<video>, <canvas>, <template>) - CSS (styling) - WebRTC (peer-to-peer communication) - WebGL (3d) - Local Storage (local persistent storage) - Web Workers (threading) - Device APIs (geolocation, orientation, camera, other sensors)

I don't mean throw your website behind a mini-browser and call it desktop app, but if you design a desktop application with web technologies there are some very interesting combinations.

I also think the biggest gains come from realizing this is literally just the ui. The desktop application doesn't have to be written in javascript, you can still write your application logic in c++, and all you have to do is expose an endpoint and talk over localhost!

[giancarlostoro]

Web apps not in the normal sense. You get to design a desktop application that takes advantage of web technologies, but gives you full native access with projects like Electron and NW.js so it's really native apps built on top of web technologies, which a browser is pretty native. Instead of having to download Qt or another C++ toolkit and worry about the lincensing, you download a 30MB browser (or however big it is) that is MIT licensed, and comes with Node.js out of the box giving you all of Node without having installed Node to begin with. It's really interesting in my opinion.