Develop Native Application on Ubuntu with HTML/CSS GUI?

Question

Redmond has a good idea occasionally:

The next-gen Windows will come with a new programming foundation, letting developers build native apps with the same techniques they use for Web applications. Microsoft calls this new variety "tailored apps."

There is always a steep learning curve for developing GUIs; each new toolkit you learn is different enough that it takes a lot of time and effort and frustration. Thus developing in HTML with CSS begins to look very appealing: it's much easier and much more portable; and with HTML 5 and CSS 3, it is very powerful.

Is there any support yet on Ubuntu (or even better, a cross-platform toolkit) for developing native applications that use HTML/CSS for the GUI? To minimize overhead, I do not want to start a full browser session. (That's not very good desktop integration.) I am particularly interested in answers for native JavaScript or Python 3, but any language would be alright (easier to learn a new language than a new GUI toolkit, in my book).

Edit: I have found this page, but have not had time to read it all or test it. It linked to Python XULRunner, but again I have no previous knowledge of it.

Answer 1

I would like to add QtWebKit to the list. It's like SeedKit with better support.

I'm using it personally on a project where we have native (C++) code for the data layer, business logic and the presentation layer is done via HTML5 and heavy use of JavaScript. As far as I know Qt can be used with python as well so perhaps you could use it for all the business logic.

Answer 2

You can write native apps in HTML/CSS and Javascript using node-webkit, is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js, you can use node.js modules into your apps. it's available on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows

Answer 3

This was asked on Ask Ubuntu back in August of 2011.

In summary, the options are:

• SeedKit

• The JavaScript bindings for GNOME.

There are more options, but those are the two "big ones".