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

Accessing hardware


We have checked how we can connect to the database directly from Electron without using any web server or any other type of server implementation. But the database is not the only native part that we need to access when developing a desktop application. Usually, you will have to access the hardware and sometimes you may need to do some computations that need more memory and resources. In this section, let's check how we can access the hardware and operating system components from an Electron application.

With Node.js, we can write native add-ons/libraries, which are dynamically linked, shared objects written in C or C++, and these can be loaded into the Node.js runtime using the standard require function. So, basically, you can write some C or C++ code that can be used inside your Node.js application. But there are some prerequisites to using the native modules inside Node.js.

As this code is written in C or C++, we need to compile and link the compiled object in order to...