Book Image

Cross-platform Desktop Application Development: Electron, Node, NW.js, and React

By : Dmitry Sheiko
Book Image

Cross-platform Desktop Application Development: Electron, Node, NW.js, and React

By: Dmitry Sheiko

Overview of this book

Building and maintaining cross-platform desktop applications with native languages isn’t a trivial task. Since it’s hard to simulate on a foreign platform, packaging and distribution can be quite platform-specific and testing cross-platform apps is pretty complicated.In such scenarios, web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript can be your lifesaver. HTML5 desktop applications can be distributed across different platforms (Window, MacOS, and Linux) without any modifications to the code. The book starts with a walk-through on building a simple file explorer from scratch powered by NW.JS. So you will practice the most exciting features of bleeding edge CSS and JavaScript. In addition you will learn to use the desktop environment integration API, source code protection, packaging, and auto-updating with NW.JS. As the second application you will build a chat-system example implemented with Electron and React. While developing the chat app, you will get Photonkit. Next, you will create a screen capturer with NW.JS, React, and Redux. Finally, you will examine an RSS-reader built with TypeScript, React, Redux, and Electron. Generic UI components will be reused from the React MDL library. By the end of the book, you will have built four desktop apps. You will have covered everything from planning, designing, and development to the enhancement, testing, and delivery of these apps.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Welcome to TypeScript

When working on a large scalable application, it's essential that established architecture has been followed by all the team members. In other languages, such as Java, C++, C#, and PHP, we can declare types and interfaces. So, no one can go with a new functionality unless it fully satisfies the interface intended by the system architect. JavaScript has neither strict types nor interfaces. That why, in 2012, engineers of Microsoft developed a superset of JavaScript (ES2015) called TypeScript. This language extends JavaScript with optional static typing and compiles back to JavaScript, so is acceptable by any browser and operating system. It is similar to how we compile ES.Next to ECMAScript of the fifth edition with Babel, but in addition, brings us features that are unlikely to be integrated into ECMAScript in the foreseeable future. The language is...