darreld

I'm starting a project to scratch an itch of mine and I'd like for it to be available for all 3 major desktop platforms. This is the point in projects where I seem to have grown a big case of Analysis Paralysis.

I have decided to use a web UI for a desktop app. My current research leads me to .Net/Nancy/Kestrel, or Java. The UI will be a self-hosted SPA talking to localhost. I am concerned about users on non-Windows platforms reluctance to use dotnet core and also to less technical users on Windows needing a current Java JRE installed, since I fear it may have fallen somewhat out of favor. I think a large portion of users would be part of an enterprise.

My preference, at least for development, would be Java but that's because I have much more experience in Java than C#/.Net.

I supposed I could do it in Python, but I'm not nuts about the deployment story for folks listed above. I'm not interested in Electron.

I thought I'd see what HN had to say about the choice.

How are people making money, now or in the future, from these? I'm having trouble seeing it, although this is certainly not the first time I couldn't envision the market for future technologies.

I'm researching using Python for commercial desktop applications but deployment seems problematic. I'm trying to decide if I'm looking at the wrong technology?

I love the language and I can see how productive I would be in it but I really need to be able to produce clean .exe files to deliver, and I would like for the solution to be cross-platform. I will be using Python 3.6+ and wxpython. cx_Freeze doesn't do single file exe's. Pyinstaller doesn't seem to play well with Python3 (maybe I'm doing it wrong). py2exe doesn't work for me either.

I'm sure there are a lot of very smart people working on this so it must be a hard problem which I would certainly be willing to help with but I'm wondering if I'm picking the wrong technology.

Alternatively I would use JavaFX, which would be fine, just not quite as productive.