Can Dart make Standalone Desktop Applications?

[Matt f]

I've been making a project in Dart, manipulating HTML for the GUI. It runs great in the web browser. I'm just wondering if it'd be possible to have the thing packaged as a desktop application using a built in standalone Dartium engine?

In my opinion HTML is the best GUI framework and it'd be cool to make desktop applications using Dart. Applications I could put on various app stores.

[Allan MacDonald]

Matt,

I have not tried this myself, but all indications are that you can create Chrome Applications using Dart, and in turn, Chrome applications can be packaged as stand alone applications that run on the desktop, disconnected from the internet.

Check out https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-app-samples/tree/master/dart and the answer for the following Stack Overflow article. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17870701/localstorage-in-chrome-package-apps-using-dart

Others can likely provide more details, but this is as close to what you are looking for that I can think of.

Allan

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Matt f <gando...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been making a project in Dart, manipulating HTML for the GUI. It runs great in the web browser. I'm just wondering if it'd be possible to have the thing packaged as a desktop application using a built in standalone Dartium engine?

In my opinion HTML is the best GUI framework and it'd be cool to make desktop applications using Dart. Applications I could put on various app stores.

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[Matt f]

That looks pretty cool. Though it seems that it isn't entirely standalone. When I try to open the standalone app, it opens Chrome first. Then the app opens.

[Alain Ekambi]

Client side Dart compiles down to JS.

So you can use  stuff Adobe AIR, Chrome package apps or TideSDK to turn your web app into standalone Desktop apps

2013/12/30 Matt f <gando...@gmail.com>

[Luiz Mineo]

Hi Matt,

Recently, I published a small Dart package that provides integration with node-webkit:

http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/node_webkit

node-webkit is a runtime that allows building desktop apps with html and JavaScript:

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit 

Unfortunately, there is no way yet to use the Dart VM to build desktop apps, so you have to compile your app to JavaScript, but I hope it will be useful anyway.

Luiz.

[Tom Maiaroto]

This completely misses the point. There's absolutely no benefit here... You might as well write in JavaScript/Node.js instead. 

We compile to JS for the web because we can't control which browser the user uses. However if we're building for a desktop app which is just a browser being packaged with the app code...We can choose which browser is being bundled with everything. So we should be using Dart VM. The performance is so much better.

Otherwise, we aren't solving any problems. We already can build desktop apps with JavaScript. There's no real sense in using Dart to do that.

I'm not super familiar with the internals of Appjs.com and how it uses CEF and such...But I'd be interested in learning more because I think that same approach should work for Dart and Chrome/Dartium with the Dart VM packed in there.

This will be super super cool stuff.

....After some more reading I realize Chrome Apps will do all this, but Dart VM is not yet integrated. Can't wait for that!

[Günter Zöchbauer]

Using Dart and build to JS does make sense. JS speed isn't far behind Dart in the VM and a big advantage is the superior development experience in Dart. When the first browsers with Dart support are out they can run Dart directly without additional work.

[Andrey Zakharov]

There is https://code.google.com/p/phpdesktop/ project which , as far I can see, just pack all you client and server stuff, chrome's webkit to single exe.
Its embed PHP module, but there is support to embed anything else. Maybe dart VM.