Book Image

NW.js Essentials

By : Benoit
Book Image

NW.js Essentials

By: Benoit

Overview of this book

If you are an experienced Node.js developer who wants to create amazing desktop applications using NW.js, this is the book for you. Prior knowledge of HTML5, jQuery, and CSS is assumed.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Node.js global and process objects


In NW.js, the global object works much like it does in Node.js with the peculiarity of being accessible from within the DOM, giving an additional way to share objects between the window and Node.js contexts. Moreover, when the window object is created, all the members of the global object are assigned to it, which is why you can use require() from within the DOM.

This binding works both ways, so you can access global properties and methods assigned in the window context inside Node.js modules. Let's see a simple example:

  • index.html:

    var gui = require('nw.gui');
    gui.Window.open('newWindow.html');
    global.sharedObjects = {
      myData: 'Foo'
    };
    var myModule = require('./module.js');
  • module.js:

    console.log(sharedObjects.myData);
  • newWindow.html:

    console.log(global.sharedObjects.myData);

As illustrated, inside our module, we've omitted global as it's already assigned as the global root variable. You may be tempted, then, to do all of your coding inside Node.js modules,...