I would like to use javascript to develop general-purpose GUI applications. Initially these are to run on Windows, but I would like them to ultimately be cross-platform.
Is there a way to do this without having to make the application run in a browser?
Check out Adobe AIR.
From Wikipedia:
Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.
Also check out Mozilla Prism (in beta).
You could try to combine something like SUN's Lively Kernel with Mozilla's Prism.
Lively Kernel is a GUI Stack written entirely in JavaScript using SVG for display purposes.
Prism is a way to launch web applications without showing the browser in which they run.
Very bleeding edge though, use at your own risk. :-)
XUL Runner might be an answer, but I'm afraid I can't speak from experience.
Try AIR, you can even use your JS toolkit of choice Using it with dojo look at this: http://dojocampus.org/content/2008/04/02/dojo-on-air-a-fancy-file-uploader/
Today I came across this: http://code.google.com/p/jslibs/
(from DZone)
JS Libs seems to meet my requirement. I'll have a look, and if I find that it's interesting, I'll post back here.