Evolution of Electron - NodeFest 2016

Transcript

1. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
   NODEFEST 2016
   

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2. 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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3. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
   Electron was born because of Atom editor.
   

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4. 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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5. 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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6. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
   Then Node.js was getting popular.
   

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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
    We need to rewrite node-webkit.
    

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13. 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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14. 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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15. 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
    IN SUMMARY:
    ▸ Better design
    ‣ Friendly to contributors
    

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16. 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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17. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
    STARS ON GITHUB (0 TO 37607)
    

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18. 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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19. EVOLUTION OF ELECTRON
    ELECTRON TEAM GROWS
    

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

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

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22. 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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23. THANK YOU
    

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