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Electron

Electron is an Open Source and free tool for building cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, built by GitHub.

electron showcase

It’s very popular and hugely successful applications use it, including VS Code, Slack, Discord and many, many more.

Electron is a huge project that revolutionized native desktop app development, by making it viable to be a JavaScript-based process.

It was possible to write JavaScript-based desktop applications even before Electron, with other tools, but Electron made it much more mainstream. In particular Electron allowed to create cross-platform desktop apps. Before, there was no tool that could let you run the same app everywhere.

Electron internals

Electron is basically bundling the Chromium rendering library and Node.js (Chromium the open source project made by Google, on which they build the Chrome browser).

You have both access to a canvas powered by Chromium, which runs the V8 JavaScript engine, and use any Node.js package, and run your own Node.js code.

It’s a sort of Node.js for the desktop, if you wish. It does not provide any kind of GUI elements, but rather lets you create UIs using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Electron aims to be fast, small in size, and as slim as possible, yet providing the core features that all apps can rely upon.

electron architecture

Try it out

The Electron API Demos app interactively demonstrates the most important features of the Electron API. See what's possible with Electron with sample code and helpful tips for building your app. You can download the app from GitHub

electron code

There is also a quick start project available: https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start

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