I have been investigating this very topic since the node-webkit project was announced.
I have a blog post about my early efforts http://csainty.blogspot.com/2012/01/creating-desktop-apps-with-nodejs.html
In the latest code drop you can now specify an application closedown callback, which makes it easy now to instantiate your applicaton and a localhost webserver when the application is started. Then close it all down cleanly when it is closed.
This make it pretty easy to port a web application to the desktop depending on what other server dependencies you might have.
var nwebkit = require('node-webkit'),
http = require('http');
var server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
// If you need it you can create a local web server
// You can also use express etc if preferred
}).listen(3000, '127.0.0.1');
nwebkit.init({
'url': 'index.html',
'width': 800,
'height': 600,
'onclose': function() {
server.close();
}
});
