Table of Contents for
Electron in Action

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Electron in Action by Steve Kinney Published by Manning Publications, 2018
  1. Cover
  2. Electron in Action
  3. Copyright
  4. Electron in Action
  5. Brief Table of Contents
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Preface
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. About this book
  10. About the cover illustration
  11. Part 1. Getting started with Electron
  12. Chapter 1. Introducing Electron
  13. Chapter 2. Your first Electron application
  14. Part 2. Building cross-platform applications with Electron
  15. Chapter 3. Building a notes application
  16. Chapter 4. Using native file dialog boxes and facilitating interprocess communication
  17. Chapter 5. Working with multiple windows
  18. Chapter 6. Working with files
  19. Chapter 7. Building application and context menus
  20. Chapter 8. Further operating system integration and dynamically enabling menu items
  21. Chapter 9. Introducing the tray module
  22. Chapter 10. Building applications with the menubar library
  23. Chapter 11. Using transpilers and frameworks
  24. Chapter 12. Persisting user data and using native Node.js modules
  25. Chapter 13. Testing applications with Spectron
  26. Part 3. Deploying Electron applications
  27. Chapter 14. Building applications for deployment
  28. Chapter 15. Releasing and updating applications
  29. Chapter 16. Distributing your application through the Mac App Store
  30. Code from the end of chapter 6
  31. Index
  32. List of Figures
  33. List of Tables
  34. List of Listings

Part 1. Getting started with Electron

Have you used Slack recently? Maybe you’ve written some code in Atom or Visual Studio Code or sent a message to a friend using the WhatsApp desktop application. If so, then you’ve used an Electron application. So, what is Electron? The short version is that it’s a platform for building desktop applications that run on macOS, Windows, and Linux using web technologies. Electron combines Node.js with Chromium—the open source foundation of Google Chrome. The long answer is the focus of this book in general and chapter 1 in particular.

If you’re part of a small team tasked with building desktop applications for multiple platforms, Electron is a great way to build your product without the hassle of managing two or three distinct code bases, squashing related bugs on two or three platforms, or implementing the same feature two or three times. If you’re a Node.js developer who wants to get your command-line application in front of a wider audience, Electron makes it easy to build a graphical user interface (GUI) without having to learn an entirely new skill set. If you’re a web developer who has grown accustomed to building your own solutions to problems, Electron makes it easy to access the parts of your computer that exist outside of the browser’s sandbox.

In my experience, learning Electron has both short- and long-term implications. It’s immediately gratifying to see an icon appear in your dock or task bar when you start it up or trigger a native file dialog box from the operating system using JavaScript. But, as you become more and more comfortable with Electron, you’ll find ideas for applications that you couldn’t build with either the browser or Node.js alone. You’ll be able to build a new class of applications that you may not have been able to build otherwise. My hope is that the examples in this book provide inspiration rather than merely guidelines as you embark on your journey as a desktop application developer.

In part 1, we’ll tease out exactly what Electron is and isn’t. We’ll look at some of the big players using it in the wild. I’ll elaborate on what makes it different from browser-based applications in chapter 1. In chapter 2, we’ll build a simple Electron application in a thinly veiled attempt to convince you that building applications with Electron is both easy and fun.