Question

I’m looking to create an exe (and maybe dmg) installer that simply opens an invisible browser window and navigates to a webpage. Preferably using Google Chrome’s rendering/javascript engine. The idea is that I have a web app that I need to disguise as a windows program. A bit like the way iTunes loads it’s web store.
Any tips/advice?

As a additional/separate issue, how complex would it be to package a php & mySQL server into the installer so I can run the app offline?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

One popular platform for achieving this is something called Titanium (see http://www.appcelerator.com/), although it is more often used for mobile development. Personally, I found Titanium to be a little clunky. There is an OS X tool called Fluid (http://fluidapp.com/), but that is more aimed at users who want to turn arbitrary websites into apps.

This is somewhat of a non-answer, but I would suggest thinking long and hard about whether you can use Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore) instead, as that is much more convenient for developers and — I might argue — for users as well. Maybe you can start out that way and then look into more complex solutions later if it turns out you really need it. When that time comes, it is likely that a better and cleaner solution for this has appeared.