I'm using this for work for some project and thought I'd share:

http://www.tidesdk.org/

There's a few other libraries similar. I've found this one to be very good at what it does.

Basically it packages a directory as a standalone app using chromium as the engine. There's a lot of opportunity for building interesting game clients leveraging html5 and js.

The only annoying thing I've ran into is needing a copy of each operating system to create different builds. I use virtual machines to do it, but milage is going to vary here. Especially for people wanting to be able to build apps for mac without owning mac hardware.

I'm also playing around with http://appjs.com/. It looks very promising as well.

I've been trying out a node-webkit text editor recently and yep, the experience is pretty good. Changing the UI of an app with just CSS/html works really well.

I'm not surprised this is happening in the desktop app development world, because it's already well underway for mobile development. The advantages are obvious.

It's actually quite amazing how well JS is aging compared to other languages born around the same time. I remember that in the late 90's people used to scoff at it and believed its demise was just around the corner.

I think one of the big "advantages" it has is that, like PHP, it's easy to write really bad and lazy code with it. No pesky data types to worry about, no annoying declaring your variables half the time.

TideSDK actually lets you use Ruby or Python as a valid script type.

I think for normal web apps we're making a lot of progress towards other alternatives to javascript syntax.

For example, there's quite a few people using Opal in production for serious works.

http://opalrb.org/

Then there's coffeescript and similar. I really like Opal because it lets ruby developers write ruby everywhere. Similar to some of the advantages node.js has.

I've heard this sort of back-handed compliment for many years, but I can only agree that loose typing saves time and annoyance during initial coding. It may be true that it's easy to write bad JS code that will still run and 'do something' but isn't that the case for all modern scripting languages?

I think the reason JS is doing so well is mostly the fact that it's the native script of the browser, and that a series of very smart design decisions were made very early in its life. The reason node.js is exploding has to do with the async event model which, it turns out, is a good fit for easy production of concurrent server apps. In UI design, the event model plus big advances in HTML+CSS standards has taken us to a point where it's simply a lot faster and easier to design a UI using web technologies.

Well, it depends on the language. Unfortunately, most scripting languages are weakly typed… they don't HAVE to be, but they are. Mostly because the author wanted a language to build small things quickly, and didn't care about the maintanence issues with sprawling codebases. :)

(I used to maintain about 80K lines of perl code… I know how evil it can get)

Sorry about the multiple posts. I have no idea how that happened. Can admin help with that? :)

edit by kiasyn: sorted