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

In this chapter, we dived into TypeScript. We examined basic types in variable declarations and in parameter constraints. We fiddled with interfaces for arrays and plain objects. You learned to interface functions and classes. We took note of abstraction features, such as member accessibility modifiers, parameter property, abstract classes, and methods. You learned to handle group entities with the enum type and string literals. We examined the reuse of interfaces with generic type. We have also seen how to install TypeScript declarations for global libraries and how to write our own when none is available. We started to work on the application. So, we set up Webpack to find and process the .ts/.tsx modules as well as to load CSS and web fonts. We used components of the React MDL library to create the UI. We extended the Webpack configuration with the SASS loader to process...