Electron vs Java

Overview

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

Electron vs Java: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, the key differences between Electron and Java are presented. These differences are specific and aim to provide a clear understanding of the distinctions between these two technologies.

Execution Environment: Electron is a framework that allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It utilizes the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. On the other hand, Java is a general-purpose programming language that can be used to build a wide range of applications, including desktop, web, and mobile applications. Java applications are executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which provides platform independence.
Language Usage: Electron primarily uses web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, allowing web developers to leverage their existing skills to build desktop applications. Java, on the other hand, is a programming language in itself and requires developers to write code specifically in Java. It does not rely on web technologies for application development.
Platform Independence: Electron applications can be built and run on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, without significant changes to the codebase. This is achieved by utilizing a consistent runtime environment across platforms. Java also offers platform independence through the use of the JVM, allowing applications to run on various operating systems. However, Java applications may need some adjustments to ensure compatibility with different platforms.
Performance and Memory Management: Electron applications rely on web technologies and have an inherent overhead due to the use of the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. This can lead to larger memory footprints and potential performance limitations compared to native desktop applications. Java, on the other hand, benefits from being a compiled language with efficient memory management, resulting in better performance and lower memory consumption.
Development Ecosystem: Electron has a vibrant and active community of developers, providing extensive documentation, libraries, and tools specifically tailored for building Electron applications. Java also has a large and active community, with a mature ecosystem that offers a wide range of libraries and tools for various application domains.
Resource Utilization: Since Electron applications utilize web technologies, they require a larger disk space footprint due to dependencies on the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. Java applications, being compiled to bytecode, generally have a smaller disk space footprint. Additionally, Electron applications may have higher resource utilization during runtime compared to Java applications, especially for memory and CPU usage.

In summary, the key differences between Electron and Java include the execution environment, language usage, platform independence, performance and memory management, development ecosystem, and resource utilization. These distinctions should be considered when choosing the appropriate technology for developing desktop applications.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Java, Electron

Erik

Chief Architect at LiveTiles

May 18, 2020

Decided

C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.

614k views614k

Comments

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Java	Electron
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!	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.
-	Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
Statistics
Stacks 148.0K	Stacks 11.6K
Followers 105.5K	Followers 10.0K
Votes 3.7K	Votes 148
Pros & Cons
Pros 608 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	Pros 69 Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications 53 Open source 14 Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code 8 Because it's cross platform 4 Use Node.js in the Main Process Cons 19 Uses a lot of memory 8 User experience never as good as a native app 4 No proper documentation 4 Does not native 1 Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
Integrations
Spring	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Java, Electron?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Related Comparisons

Electron vs Java: What are the differences?

Introduction

Execution Environment: Electron is a framework that allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It utilizes the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. On the other hand, Java is a general-purpose programming language that can be used to build a wide range of applications, including desktop, web, and mobile applications. Java applications are executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which provides platform independence.
Language Usage: Electron primarily uses web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, allowing web developers to leverage their existing skills to build desktop applications. Java, on the other hand, is a programming language in itself and requires developers to write code specifically in Java. It does not rely on web technologies for application development.
Platform Independence: Electron applications can be built and run on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, without significant changes to the codebase. This is achieved by utilizing a consistent runtime environment across platforms. Java also offers platform independence through the use of the JVM, allowing applications to run on various operating systems. However, Java applications may need some adjustments to ensure compatibility with different platforms.
Performance and Memory Management: Electron applications rely on web technologies and have an inherent overhead due to the use of the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. This can lead to larger memory footprints and potential performance limitations compared to native desktop applications. Java, on the other hand, benefits from being a compiled language with efficient memory management, resulting in better performance and lower memory consumption.
Development Ecosystem: Electron has a vibrant and active community of developers, providing extensive documentation, libraries, and tools specifically tailored for building Electron applications. Java also has a large and active community, with a mature ecosystem that offers a wide range of libraries and tools for various application domains.
Resource Utilization: Since Electron applications utilize web technologies, they require a larger disk space footprint due to dependencies on the Chromium rendering engine and Node.js runtime. Java applications, being compiled to bytecode, generally have a smaller disk space footprint. Additionally, Electron applications may have higher resource utilization during runtime compared to Java applications, especially for memory and CPU usage.

Electron vs Java

Overview

Electron vs Java: What are the differences?