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)

Summary

We started this chapter by implementing the rss service. We used the request module to fetch feed contents. We obtained a Writable Stream from the feedme module and configured it to parse the input into our feed container object. We piped the feedme parser into the Readable Stream produced by request. The module feedme was missing the declaration file, so we provided it with an interface.

Then, we created the Menu service, which can be used to manage and persist the menu of feeds. We considered actions and state structure required by the application. We applied the redux-actions module for creating actions and the Reducer. On the way, we examined the optimistic updates approach. While creating the store, we practiced two store enhancers redux-thunk and redux-promise that help to deal with asynchronous actions. We connected our existing components to the store and modified...