Sharad Raj

AI Engineer driven by a deep fascination for transformers and their applications in the field of NLP & Computer Vision.

I hate chemistry but I love electron

23 May 2019

Supprised after seeing the post title :smile: Well today we will be talking about one of the most popular framework for developing cross platform application using my very favourate HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

According to the official documentation

Electron is an open source library developed by GitHub for building cross-platform desktop applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Electron accomplishes this by combining Chromium and Node.js into a single runtime and apps can be packaged for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

It was released in 2013 for enabling the web developers for making cross platform applications

What is Electron?

Electronis an framework that lets you compose cross-platform desktop apps from Node.js APIs and Chromium windows.

The project came into this world as Atom Shell, but got a spiffy new name in 2015 and is now called Electron.

Apps using ElectronJS

Several large, well-known apps use Electron to offer native desktop experiences such as:

Whatsapp for Windows is the one which you might have probably used.

In a nutshell electron renders the you web app or website code in a chrome browser just like you open a website in browser. Every electron app comes with a chrome browser

What can electron do? :thinking:

Well electron can do a ton of things such as interacting with the database using NODEjs, manipulating files on machine, accessing OS APIs, and much more.

You can have a look at the official application showcase at Atom for that.

Electron provides JavaScript APIs for several common host OS functions (e.g. app trays, keyboard shortcuts with or without OS focus)