Web Technologies for Desktop Development

This Saturday, the second consecutive Webcamp Zagreb tech conference took place. This year, there were around 600 participants from Croatia and the region, and they could choose between 24 presentations.

Webcamp Zagreb is an annual developer conference organized by Croatian user groups that work with different web technologies like JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, PHP and others. One of the organizers is CodeAtSix.

CodeAtSix is a meetup we organize at Infinum that gathers developers interested in Ruby, Rails, Javascript, GIT, web and mobile app development in general.

I had the opportunity to give a presentation titled Web Technologies for Desktop Development in front of more than 250 people. In the 20 minute presentation I talked about the options developers have when developing desktop hybrid apps.

The majority of my talk was focused around node-webkit – a technology we use for developing desktop applications using Web technologies.

Node-webkit is a very powerful wrapper for hybrid desktop apps, which allows the developer to use the full power of Chromium. On the other hand, if the developer needs access to native functionality, node-webkit comes with node.js to help with that.

In the end, I would like to thank the Webcamp Zagreb organizers for an awesome conference. The schedule was tight, the organization top notch, and I’m very impressed with how they managed to bring together developers working with different technologies (typically known for flame wars) under one roof. That’s a real achievement.

I really hope the conference stays like this in the following years.