Electron - anyone using it for desktop apps?

[JerryMungo]

I'm about to give it a go. I just wondered if anyone had experience and comments / thoughts on using it vs the other cross platform desktop frameworks.

 

[stricken]

Always keep your node code and client code seperate and coupled via API or events. It's easy to end up with a coupled mess that is impossible to seperate when you need to turn a part or all of it into a web based app. Slack got it right. Atom not so much.

 

[adrianx]

Always keep your node code and client code seperate and coupled via API or events. It's easy to end up with a coupled mess that is impossible to seperate when you need to turn a part or all of it into a web based app. Slack got it right. Atom not so much.

This is besides the point and not really relevant to the discussion, but if Atom ever went web based, I would [-]probably start using something else[/-] see it as a bit of a gimmick and not use the web interface.

I don't want my browser to have access to any of my local repositories.

 

[JerryMungo]

The reason I'm considering it is simpler deployment and not having to host for my clients. I get the appeal of porting to a hosted solution later, but imagine it would be plenty challenging on its own no matter which way I go.

Go has been another consideration for simple deployment but I'd like more local control for persistent storage, though I may consider SQLite since the needs are basic at this stage. In the Go environment, for the small bit I need more tightly integrated with the OS I can then do one of the cross platform HTML/Js combos with Electron.

@Adrianx I think stricken was referring to the app in development, not the IDE.

On the IDE side, right now VS Code has won for me - with basic text or HTML or very quick and dirty edits I use sublime for the speed. For .Net I use VS Community.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

I used Electron to build a simple desktop application which used SQLite. I used Vue to create the front end and vue-router to manage the different states given that I only had 3 views to deal with. Only really needed webpack to build the front end code and the result is what was used by electron packager during the cross platform build process.

If you know Node already then it's likely going to be quite interesting/fun to work with. If not, I think maybe there would be better solutions for this.

That being said its not a whole lot of Node that is required, most of my app was front end code and it emits events to the back end (electron) in order to interface with SQLite. So the extent of the Node code was the boilerplate stuff for Electron and then an event API for dealing with the database on the front end.