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)

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Well, we can change the locale and trigger the event. What about consuming modules?
In the FileList view, we have the formatTime static method that formats the passed-in timeString for printing. We can make format it in accordance with the currently chosen locale."

A block of code is set as follows:

{ 
"name": "file-explorer",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": "main.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1"
},
"keywords": [],
"author": "",
"license": "ISC"
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo npm install nw --global

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The menu Show Item contains Folder, Copy, Paste, and Delete."

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.