Evolution of Electron - NodeFest 2016

by Cheng Zhao

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON NODEFEST 2016

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON WHO AM I ▸ 摼౮ / Cheng Zhao / υϰη̴ώδЀ ▸ Creator of Electron framework ▸ Working at GitHub ▸ GitHub: https://github.com/zcbenz

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON Electron was born because of Atom editor.

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON FIRST EDITION OF ATOM EDITOR ▸ A simple Cocoa app with embedded webview ▸ Only works on Mac OS X ▸ Native abilities were provided by writing bindings to Cocoa webview

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON CEF BASED ATOM EDITOR ▸ The native layer was rewritten with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) ▸ Native abilities were provided by writing V8 bindings ▸ Used Chromium for rendering ▸ Possibility to run on all platforms

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON Then Node.js was getting popular.

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON PORT ATOM EDITOR TO NODE-WEBKIT ▸ Use Node.js and node-webkit APIs in Atom editor ▸ Port custom bindings to Node.js native modules ▸ This try failed

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON WHY THE TRY TO USE NODE-WEBKIT FAILED ▸ node-webkit crashed a lot ▸ It was hard to convert all of Atom’s code at once ▸ node-webkit lacked lots of features

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON WHY THE TRY TO USE NODE-WEBKIT FAILED ▸ node-webkit crashed a lot ▸ It was hard to convert all of Atom’s code at once ▸ node-webkit lacked lots of features SOLUTION: ▸ Hire the maintainer (me) to improve node-webkit ‣ Use a more progressive way to port Atom to node-webkit.

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON NEW PLAN FOR MIGRATING ATOM TO NODE-WEBKIT CEF-based Atom Editor Add Node.js integration to CEF Atom Editor using Node.js Migrate Atom to use Node.js APIs Improve node-webkit Atom Editor running on node-webkit

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON WHEN TRYING TO IMPROVE NODE-WEBKIT ▸ The architecture of node-webkit was not suitable for multi-windows apps ▸ The node-webkit project was more personal project than organization

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON We need to rewrite node-webkit.

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON NEW PLAN FOR MIGRATING ATOM TO NODE-WEBKIT CEF-based Atom Editor Atom Editor using Node.js Improve node-webkit Atom Editor running on node-webkit Write atom-shell atom-shell ATOM-SHELL Add Node.js integration to CEF Migrate Atom to use Node.js APIs

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ATOM-SHELL AND NODE-WEBKIT ▸ Allows running JavaScript in the main process ▸ No longer requires a powerful machine to build ▸ Changes node integration implementation to improve stability

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON ATOM-SHELL / ELECTRON TIMELINE 2013 atom-shell started 2014 atom-shell open sourced 2015 renamed to Electron 2016 Electron 1.0

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON STARS ON GITHUB (0 TO 37607)

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON WE HAVE LOTS OF CONTRIBUTORS ▸ 25 community maintainers ▸ 492 contributors ▸ Half of the changes in recent releases were from contributors ▸ (by Nov 6, 2016)

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON ELECTRON TEAM GROWS

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON HOW ELECTRON GROWS One major developer More users More maintainers More contributors

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON HOW ELECTRON GROWS One major developer More users More maintainers More contributors Key for growth More contributors

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EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON KEEP ATTRACTING CONTRIBUTORS ▸ Being responsive to issues and pull requests ▸ isitmaintained.com ▸ Make development easier ▸ bootstrap script ▸ Code review ▸ Refactor code for better readability ▸ …

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THANK YOU