A project-based guide to help you create, package, and deploy desktop applications on multiple platforms using modern JavaScript frameworks
Key Features
- Use your web development skills with JavaScript and Node.js to build desktop applications for macOS and Windows
- Develop desktop versions of popular mobile applications that are similar to Slack, Spotify, and more
- Design desktop apps with automatic updates and real-time analytics capabilities
Book Description
The Electron framework allows you to use modern web technologies to build applications that share the same code across all operating systems and platforms. This also helps designers to easily transition from the web to the desktop. Electron Projects guides you through building cross-platform Electron apps with modern web technologies and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React.js, and Vue.js.
You'll explore the process of configuring modern JavaScript frameworks and UI libraries, real-time analytics and automatic updates, and interactions with the operating system. You'll get hands-on with building a basic Electron app, before moving on to implement a Markdown Editor. In addition to this, you'll be able to experiment with major JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and Vue.js, discovering ways to integrate them with Electron apps for building cross-platform desktop apps. Later, you'll learn to build a screenshot snipping tool, a mini-game, and a music player, while also gaining insights into analytics, bug tracking, and licensing. You'll then get to grips with building a chat app, an eBook generator and finally a simple digital wallet app.
By the end of this book, you'll have experience in building a variety of projects and project templates that will help you to apply your knowledge when creating your own cross-platform applications.
What you will learn
- Initialize Node.js, Node Package Manager (NPM), and JavaScript to set up your app
- Integrate Phaser with Electron to build a simple 2D game
- Improve app quality by adding an error tracking system and crash reports
- Implement group chat features and event handling capabilities using Firebase
- Integrate a WordPress-like rich-text editor into your app
- Build Electron applications using a single codebase
Who this book is for
This book is for JavaScript developers who want to explore the Electron framework for building desktop apps. Working knowledge of modern frontend JavaScript frameworks and Node.js is assumed. No prior knowledge of desktop development is required.
Table of Contents
- Building your first Electron application
- Building a Markdown Editor
- Integrating with Angular, React, and Vue
- Building a screenshot snipping tool
- Making a 2D game
- Building a music player
- Analytics, Bug Tracking, and Licensing
- Build a group chat application with Firebase
- Building an eBook editor and generator
- Building a digital wallet for desktops
Denys Vuika is an application platform developer and tech lead at Alfresco Software Inc. He is a full stack developer and a constant open source contributor. He has more than 16 years of programming experience, including 10 years of frontend development with AngularJS, Angular, ASP.NET, React.js, and other modern web technologies, and more than three years of experience of Node.js development. Denys works with web technologies on a daily basis. He has a good understanding of cloud development and the containerization of web applications.
He is a frequent Medium blogger and is the author of the Developing with Angular book on Angular, JavaScript, and TypeScript development. He also maintains a series of Angular-based open source projects.
