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Electron

11.3K
9.9K
+ 1
148
winjs

17
40
+ 1
1
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Electron vs winjs: What are the differences?

What is Electron? Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub. 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.

What is winjs? A UI toolkit for modern browsers, by Microsoft. WinJS is a set of JavaScript toolkits that allow developers to build applications using HTML/JS/CSS technology forged with the following principles in mind: 1. Provide developers with a distinctive set of UI controls with high polish and performance with fundamental support for touch, mouse, keyboard and accessibility 2. Provide developers with a cohesive set of components and utilities to build the scaffolding and infrastructure of their applications'.

Electron and winjs are primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" and "Javascript UI Libraries" tools respectively.

Electron and winjs are both open source tools. Electron with 74.9K GitHub stars and 9.81K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than winjs with 4.07K GitHub stars and 504 GitHub forks.

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Pros of Electron
Pros of winjs
  • 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
  • 1
    Developed by Microsoft
  • 0
    Aa

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Cons of Electron
Cons of winjs
  • 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
  • 1
    Wrong reference for dom inspection
  • 1
    Small community

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- No public GitHub repository available -

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.

What is winjs?

WinJS is a set of JavaScript toolkits that allow developers to build applications using HTML/JS/CSS technology forged with the following principles in mind: 1. Provide developers with a distinctive set of UI controls with high polish and performance with fundamental support for touch, mouse, keyboard and accessibility. 2. Provide developers with a cohesive set of components and utilities to build the scaffolding and infrastructure of their applications'

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What companies use Electron?
What companies use winjs?
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What tools integrate with Electron?
What tools integrate with winjs?

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What are some alternatives to Electron and winjs?
Photon
The fastest way to build beautiful Electron apps using simple HTML and CSS. Underneath it all is Electron. Originally built for GitHub's Atom text editor, Electron is the easiest way to build cross-platform desktop applications.
React Native Desktop
Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.
React Native
React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
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.
See all alternatives