Cross platform desktop development with HTML5 GUI

Question

Short story: is there a way to write a desktop application with a GUI in HTML5 and core in a cross-platform language like python (or even C#/Mono)?

Longer story: I'm a C# developer, for small personal projects I seldom do, running both under Windows and OSX, I use C# (Mono) with a frontend leveraging on Eto.Forms

I'd like to understand if there's a mature way to achieve the same results using an HTML5 GUI, since I'd like to learn that and believe it could be a good option for near-future Windows desktop UIs (or otherwise a nice tool to have in my skillset). Of course if the code running behind the scenes is C# I'll be more than happy, but also getting my feet wet in another, maybe more cross-platform like python would be good.

At this stage I'm not interested in any mobile-oriented solution.

Answer 1

Electron (formerly Atom shell) has really matured as of late. In fact it's what VSCode is built on.

There's a great tutorial and starter code on using Angular 2 and Typescript, and you can even use VSCode to write and build it.

For me this is the best way to transition from the WPF world to HTML5.

Answer 2

the NW.js look pretty promising... you might even be able to use TypeScript which would be much closer to C# than plain ol' js. If you're open to using PHP, you can check out the nightrain project https://github.com/naetech/nightrain.