Yes, there are frameworks like Vaadin that let you write a desktop-like app. Your app will send a small bit of precompiled JS to the client, which will handle u

Yes, there are frameworks like Vaadin that let you write a desktop-like app. Your app will send a small bit of precompiled JS to the client, which will handle updating the page when the backend tells it to. There are also many transpilers that compile other languages to JS. ScalaJS comes to mind, but almost every language has something like this. Thanks to Google's attempt to push Dart, there's even a way to get in-browser debugging for most transpiled langauges.