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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@Gordon
@oesterle yes, it can actually run under Electron right now as well - but the situation is actually even worse there :)
The problem is getting to talk to the underlying hardware - as you say there are loads of solutions for packaging HTML out there already. Generally getting at the OS for stuff like Bluetooth LE requires native modules, and that means that if you insist on installing yourself from GitHub you need to have a build environment installed.
I've pre-built everything for Windows so it should work fine if you just download the binaries from the Web IDE page, but I believe @OwenBrotherwood is trying to compile himself, and setting up a compile environment for Node.js in Windows is really painful.
NW.js has the real benefit that it contains Chrome's extensions - that means that on Mac and Linux it 'just works' (assuming you have BLE set up right) without needing any other modules. It's only on Windows where there's no Web Bluetooth support that there's a big issue (although it'll still work for USB devices), but when Chrome finally adds Web Bluetooth support for Windows in the next few months it'll start 'just working' too - I think at that point it'll be the only sensible solution for this kind of thing.