I am building a web based RIA application using web technologies including Rails based server side code, and client side based on HTML,CSS,JQuery and plugins etc.
I am looking forward to creating a standalone cross platform application using the same code-base (I do not want to rewrite the application UI in Qt or some other language/library).
Also, I dont want that clients should have to set up a web server to view the content. The application is heavily ajax based and communicates with the restful backend. The desktop client should be able to have exactly the same functionality with additional provision of local storage and synchronization of data.
I wish to carry out the entire development process on linux. Now that Adobe has stopped supporting AIR on linux, I am not taking that as a viable candidate. I have been looking into Mozilla prism, its almost what I am looking for, except for the fact that it does not seem to have any provision for local storage or interaction with local filesystem.
It would be preferable if the solution is open source. My entire codebase from bottom up is based on open source technologies and as far as possible I would like to keep it that way.
Also, I am comfortable hand-coding my application and features like, integration with existing IDEs, GUI development environment, powerful application builder wizards etc. are not necessary requirements.
I have been suggested that it is possible to have a webkit component embedded in a Qt application and carry out what I want, but I am unable to locate proper resources that can help me do that. I am familiar with Java and C plus plus, so writing additional wrapper code in some other language is not a major hurdle.
If somehow local storage facility can be added to prism, that would be a highly preferred solution.
Also creating a plugin for google-chrome/chromium is a possible alternative. How does it compare to above options.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
