Native OS X apps in JS?

Question

I would like to write an application in JavsScript that runs natively on OS X. It would be a bonus if it could be used for Windows apps as well, however I am primarily interested in the OS X / Cocoa tie in initially.

I was entertaining the possibility of writing all of the business logic in JS and then the primary UI components with Cocoa and .NET respectively, but I got to thinking that it would be nice if there were something already in place that would facilitate such a workflow without having to support a few different codebases.

After researching this a bit, I obviously became overwhelmed with the solutions that seem to exist for iOS development, however hitherto I've found nothing that really seems to also work on OS X. Are there any solutions that I may be overlooking? If not, what might be the recommended path for basing most business logic in a JavaScript app and interfacing with that for the native UI components?

Answer 1

This is becoming a hot topic. I suggest you read this article about a JavaScript Objective-C bridge for OS 10.9. Also, check out this code sample from Apple in which the application controller is simply responsible for communicating between objects and JavaScript is really driving everything. The sample is called JavaScriptCoreHeadstart and Apple describes it as follows:

JavaScriptCore is a new system framework available in Mac OS X 10.5 that allows applications to run JavaScripts. This sample shows one way to use JavaScriptCore for providing user configurable features in a Cocoa application. Here, a number of JavaScript objects are defined that represent various parts of the application and the application's controller is really just a thin shell that calls JavaScripts that decide how the application will operate in response to Interface Builder action method calls and WebKit delegate callbacks. The JavaScripts themselves control the application through the objects that represent different parts of the application.

Answer 2

There is NodObjC that should allow you to write Cocoa applications for NodeJS.