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

Packaging the Electron into asar archive 


The preceding part just copied your Electron application, and the files were simply placed under the Electron prebuilt resources directory. This will expose the source to the end user. Users can just navigate to the resources folder to get the real source code of the application. Electron provides a simple archiving format called asar that can be used to package the source code into a zip like a file format. Asar is a simple archive format created for Electron apps. With asar, it still can be extracted into the actual code structure. However, it gives some way to archive all your source code into a single file, which hides the source code from the user. Once the asar is created, you then need to place the file into the resources directory and rename the file into app.asar so that the Electron shell can detect the application automatically.

On Windows and Linux, the structure should be as follows after copying the asar archive:

Electron Prebuilt  
...