Discover easy-to -build desktop apps
Electron is actually a browser packaged with node.js and a few APIs. Because it’s built on top of the Chromium browser, you have everything available from there to add to your application. GitHub developed it as part of the Atom editor; it was open-sourced in 2014 and is now popular with many open source developers. Electron is practical for building small (ish–Ed), simple desktop applications since it uses web technologies. This makes it very easy for web developers to make a desktop application.
It has already been used for many productivity and development applications. The obvious use case is the Atom editor which GitHub developed in parallel. Other applications lift out web pages and social media and drop them into their own application.
In this tutorial, you will learn how the parts hang together and how to create simple applications in Electron. You will end up with your own ‘To Do’ application that you can tweak to your heart’s content.
To follow this tutorial, all you need is your favourite editor prepared to handle JavaScript and HTML. You should not need a browser, though the Electron system uses and Node.js. To make sure you get at least a glimpse of the ecosystem that is Electron, download from GitHub. This repository is a very basic application that contains code to open a window. It is not useful on its own, but it contains many comments to help you get started and get your head around some principles used.
