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

Introducing Photon kit


Photon kit is a CSS library that provides a native-like look and feels for widgets. If you have ever worked with Bootstrap, you know that the CSS frameworks are important for creating a responsive user interface. It reduces a lot of efforts by providing solutions to common problems. Photon is almost the same as Bootstrap, but it is built for Electron or any other desktop application development. It's a very lightweight framework that includes CSS styles to create both Mac and Windows native-like widgets and user interface. You can download the Photon library from: http://www.photonkit.com.

Laying out the application

Download the framework and copy the dist folder into the project root. You can include the style using standard link tags in your index.html file. Every Photon application has some basic structure. All the application elements should be wrapped by two container div's with the window CSS class and window-content class:

<div class="window">
  <div class...