Building Desktop Applications
with Node and Electron
Steve Kinney — @stevekinney
EmpireNode 2015
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Hi. I'm Steve
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Hi. I'm Steve
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http://turing.io
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Electron (née Atom Shell)
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Electron (née Atom Shell)
A framework for building cross-platform desktop
applications with web technologies.
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So, why would you want
to use this Electron thing?
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You want to build an application
that has advanced permissions
like accessing the file system.
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You want to build a small
application that lives in the
user’s menubar or system tray.
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You want to build an app
that works well offline.
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You want to be able to
Command/Alt-Tab to your
application.
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sindresorhus/caprine
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Why is Electron so
super cool?
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Chrome Content Module
HTML5 support
GPU acceleration
Blink and V8
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Node 4.1
Filesystem access
Native modules
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Electron uses a pretty
modern build of Chromium.
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The web browser lives in a kind of
sandbox with a bunch of restrictions
in place in the name of security.
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Ugh. Gross.
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Electron applications have all of
the freedom of any other Node
process.
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require(…);
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hij1nx/levelui
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muan/mojibar
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muan/mojibar
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How does Electron
work?
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npm install -g
electron-prebuilt
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Inherently, offline
first.
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versus
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No good.
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require('remote');
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Building a menu
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And more…
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npm install -g
electron-prebuilt
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npm install menubar
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npm install -g
electron-packager
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npm install -g
electron-accelerator
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npm install -g
electron-compile
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The Future for
Electron
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sindresorhus/awesome-electron
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sindresorhus/awesome-electron
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Thank you.
Twitter, Github, and like everything else: @stevekinney
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/stevekinney
Be a mentor or hire our students: http://turing.io