MacGap vs Node.js: What are the differences?
Developers describe MacGap as "Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications". MacGap provides HTML/JS/CSS developers an Xcode project for developing native OS X App. These Apps run in OS X's WebView and take advantage of WebKit technologies. MacGap exposes a JavaScript API for OS X integration, such as displaying native notifications or writing data to a file. MacGap is extremely lightweight and nimble; a blank application weighs less than 1MB. On the other hand, Node.js is detailed as "A platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications". Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
MacGap belongs to "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category of the tech stack, while Node.js can be primarily classified under "Frameworks (Full Stack)".
"Remember that Mac app you always wanted to create... ?" is the top reason why over 2 developers like MacGap, while over 1321 developers mention "Npm" as the leading cause for choosing Node.js.
MacGap and Node.js are both open source tools. It seems that Node.js with 35.5K GitHub stars and 7.78K forks on GitHub has more adoption than MacGap with 3.59K GitHub stars and 226 GitHub forks.