I wonder if the way that atom was built is or can turn into a good way to build modern cross platform desktop apps while employing web technologies. Does anyone have any input or actual experience with this?
If you know node backend and web front-end, there are at least two options right now:
For a self-contained, deployable desktop application use `node-webkit`. It is basically chromium + embedded node.js. From what I'm reading, atom-shell is similar to node-webkit. There are a few other `node-webkit` like projects on github.
For lighter deployments, where your audience already has chrome and node.js installed, try `node-chrome`. It's a skeleton to run a chrome packaged app locally which communicates over websockets to a node.js service you build.
Both of these are good options if your UI, notifications can be contained in HTML. Challenges arise when you want to use OS specific integrated menus, growls/notifications, tooltips, etc. Node-webkit may have addressed most of these by now.
