December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
50 pages
1h 14m
English
Content preview from Introducing Electron
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. What Is Electron?
Chances are high that you are already using a desktop app powered by web technologies. Popular apps like Spotify, Visual Studio Code, Atom, GitHub Desktop, and Slack all rely on a JavaScript stack—and even software powerhouses like Adobe’s Creative Suite and the Nvidia Windows Drivers come with Node.js bundled in.
Electron is an open source framework that allows developers to use web technologies to build desktop applications. Initial development started in 2013 at GitHub to support the hackable text and code editor Atom. Both were made publicly available in the spring of 2014, but Electron has since surpassed Atom in popularity and become GitHub’s biggest open source project to date. In 2017, Electron is being maintained by a team at GitHub with support from the community. Microsoft, Slack, Figma, Brave, and other companies, as well as dedicated individuals, continue to invest in the development and maintenance of the project.
This short guide introduces Electron, the most popular framework and runtime for cross-platform desktop applications built with web technologies (and, optionally, with native components too). Though far from a complete reference, it briefly introduces each aspect of developing and distributing an Electron-based app, allowing you to get the 30,000-foot overview.
Building Desktop Apps with Chromium, Node.js, and C++
At its core, Electron consists of three components. It embeds Chromium’s rendering library (known as libchromiumcontent ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.