Book Image

Building Cross-Platform Desktop Applications with Electron

By : Muhammed Jasim
Book Image

Building Cross-Platform Desktop Applications with Electron

By: Muhammed Jasim

Overview of this book

<p>Though web applications are becoming increasingly popular, desktop apps are still important. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and this book will teach you how to create your first desktop application with Electron. It will guide you on how to build desktop applications that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.</p> <p>You will begin your journey with an overview of Electron, and then move on to explore the various stages of creating a simple social media application. Along the way, you will learn how to use advanced Electron APIs, debug an Electron application, and make performance improvements using the Chrome developer tools. You’ll also find out how to package and distribute an application, and more.</p> <p>By the end of the book, you will be able to build a complete desktop application using Electron and web technologies. You will have a solid understanding of the common challenges that desktop app developers face, and you’ll know how to solve them.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Building and packaging the Electron application


Packaging an Electron application can be done in various ways. There are different tools available to do the packaging for you. It can also be done manually. Before checking the tools that automate the Electron application packaging, let's check how we can package the application manually so that you will get a detailed idea about the internals of the Electron packaging process, which is essential even when you are using the automated tools.

Distributing an Electron application is simple when comparing desktop applications that are developed using other technologies. The prebuilt binaries that can be used to distribute the application are available for download. This prebuilt binary is also shipped with the npm module that you have already installed as part of your application development. You can find this inside your node_modules/electron/dist folder. For the time being, download the same or copy the folder to your disk and extract it if downloaded...