Introduction

node-webkit is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js. You can write native apps in HTML and Javascript with node-webkit. It also lets you to call Node.js modules directly from DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all Web technologies.

It's created and developed in Intel Open Source Technology Center.

Features

  • Apps written in modern HTML5, CSS3, JS and WebGL.
  • Complete support for Node.js APIs and all its third party modules.
  • Good performance: Node and WebKit runs in the same thread: Function calls are made straightforward; objects are in the same heap and can just reference each other;
  • Easy to package and distribute apps.
  • Available on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows

Quick Start

Create index.html:

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
We are using node.js <script>document.write(process.version)</script>
</body>
</html>

Create package.json:

{
  "name": "nw-demo",
  "main": "index.html"
}

Compress index.html and package.json into a zip archive, and rename it to app.nw:

app.nw
|-- package.json
`-- index.html

Download the prebuilt binary for your platform and use it to open the app.nw file:

$ ./nw app.nw

Note: on Windows, you can drag the app.nw to nw.exe to open it.

Native UI API