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Electron

Frameworks

What is Electron?

With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Electron is a tool in the Frameworks category of a tech stack.

Key Features

Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.Electron is open sourcemaintained by GitHub and an active community.Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.Automatic updatesCrash reportingWindows installersDebugging & profilingNative menus & notifications

Electron Pros & Cons

Pros of Electron

✓Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications
✓Open source
✓Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code
✓Because it's cross platform
✓Use Node.js in the Main Process

Cons of Electron

✗Uses a lot of memory
✗User experience never as good as a native app
✗Does not native
✗No proper documentation
✗Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
✗Wrong reference for dom inspection

Electron Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Electron?

Node.js

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.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Vue.js

Electron Discussions

Discover why developers choose Electron. Read real-world technical decisions and stack choices from the StackShare community.Showing 8 of 10 discussions.

Ľubomír Sobinovský

founder at SOBSOFT, s.r.o.

Feb 26, 2019

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

I just wanted to try simple way how to create cross platform application and Electron was perfect decision and now understand why Visual Studio Code is build on it.

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CTO at Shipmnts

Dec 1, 2018

Needs adviceon

Early days in our ideation, Electron was a primary unanimous choice. Reason, we wanted to store a lot of data offline in the file systems of user, and provide a seamless experience. We ended up moving away from Desktop after 1.5 years of developing Electron. Have shared the reasons why in the blog below.

Just a Reminder: There are a lot of good things Electron has to offer. This blog just focuses on the Cons of using it.

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Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 13, 2018

Needs adviceon

We wanted to experiment with building an Electron app with downloads for every Linux distro, macOS, and Windows, in addition to the web. Fundamentally, this seemed pretty easy: we write code, wrap it in an Electron shell, and release to our desired operating system… It turns out we were wrong.

Electron, though powerful, turned out to be a bigger beast than we had anticipated. Building to different distros was especially hard, even with electron-builder (granted, we had the bad luck of needing to patch electron-builder (and that bug has since been fixed), but that only accounted for some of the pain points we hit). The macOS menu bar had to be just right for the macOS store to accept our app, and performing small tasks with the Electron API, like opening a link in an external browser, turned out to be pretty difficult.

Despite the difficulties, our team moved forward with some custom tooling (all visible and open-sourced on Github) and we released not only to all of our release targets but to the web, too.

#CrossPlatformDesktopDevelopment

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Jan 18, 2018

Needs adviceon

Our Web Applications are served on our Desktops by Electron. This allows us to have native apps running on our Workstations without having too many Browser Tabs open at the same time. Electron

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Dec 20, 2016

Needs adviceon

Electron is the current preferred method to convert games made in the Game Pencil Editor for desktop support. Electron

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Jun 28, 2016

Needs adviceon

Used Electron to package single page web application as a desktop application. Electron

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Founder at Metrix Financial Reporting Solutions UG

Jan 11, 2016

Needs adviceon

Implement a web-service using your favorite tools but sell a desktop application for oblivious windows users. Electron

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Jul 31, 2015

Needs adviceon

Our application began as an HTML5 browser game, however we decided to leverage certain native parts of desktop applications by wrapping our client code into Electron. This also allowed us to not have to worry about compatibility across all the various browsers. Electron

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