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

Networking from the main process


There are a number of libraries available in Node.js for creating and managing network requests. When it comes to choosing your browser, you have the standard XMLHttpRequest and fetch modules available. With Electron, as the Node.js context is available in both the main and the renderer process, you have as many choices as the Node.js has. Any third party or built-in networking module can work with the Electron. Other than all these modules, Electron provides access to the chromium native networking library that can be used inside the main process. There is some advantage of this library over others, as it provides better support for web proxy. The API specifications are same as the Node.js built-in HTTP module. So, you won't feel any differences to use this library in terms of syntax and usage. As I already mentioned, this module provides some key benefits over other libraries, such as the Node.js HTTP module:

  • It manages the system proxy configuration and...