Nativefier Instantly Converts Any Website Into a Desktop Program Using Command Line

Even if the web pages’ capabilities have increased with HTML 5 and JavaScript, we still tend to think a web page as something where images, texts, and videos live inside the browser. The growth and advancement in JavaScript and its extensions have brought an era of the web applications. A URL can now work as a fully developed web application like Google Maps.

As web apps have made a progress to this point, developers have been trying to break web applications free from its native web. JavaScript applications, on the others hand, have been able to ditch the browser thanks to the Node.js platform.

Node.js is a runtime environment that allows JavaScript to run by interacting within a normal computer operating system rather than merely a browser. It’s commonly used to build JS-based web servers in place of PHP.

Nativefier does this using a framework called Electron. The Electron framework enables a programmer to write desktop applications in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

It first automatically creates a template of the target website and then feeds the template into Electron, which then “wraps” the template with all of the required stuff to make an .exe or .app file, using a browser window to render the HTML.

Nativefier is a user-friendly platform. It runs from the Node.js command line simply as:

nativefier “http://fossbytes.com”

— Nativefier

What do you think of the future of the web development? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

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