We currently don't have a nice open source API for building node apps, but would welcome PRs that get us in this direction!
There are two ways to build a node app using the XAR builder tools.
1. Use the `make_xar` tool which will create a XAR from a directory and takes an optional script to run on execution.
2. Use the XAR builder library to make a XAR builder that is specialized for building node apps.
I'm curious how it compares to using something like pkg [0].
[0] https://github.com/zeit/pkg