4 ms·

Good to have this kind of feedback from someone who used both. Could you expand the comparison on a few key points?

johnthedebs 11y ago
I'm not OP, but I've also used both and recently switched a production app from NW.js to Electron. I'm extremely happy with the decision to switch. Benefits of Electron: * Much more active development, more frequent releases, more quickly addressed bugs (this is huge) * More active ecosystem * Lower level API that requires you to perhaps do a bit more work to achieve the same cross-platform behavior but gives more control and fewer weird issues * Much better documentation * Much better error reporting. It may have just been me, but when I had a JS error in NW.js, the process would simply crash with no feedback whatsoever (which as you can imagine is infuriating). I opened a couple issues about it and never got any help or feedback. Electron pops up a dialog with a stack trace. Edit: * Another major difference is that NW.js uses a shared global object for communicating between the main process and renderer (BrowserWindow) processes. Electron uses evented message passing using an `ipc` (inter-process communication) module that makes for more robust code. * Besides being lower-level, the API is just (IMO) a lot better/more powerful in general
- ronjouch 11y ago
  Thanks!
- z3t4 11y ago
  About error reporting in nw.js, it's just like working with chrome (chromium), you see JS errors in: developer tools > console tab. You could probably send messages to a log instead of the developer tools (might require editing the nw.js source code).
  - johnthedebs 11y ago
    Yeah, I should have been more clear. Regular JS in the renderer processes showed errors in the console as usual. However, if I tried using one of the NW.js APIs incorrectly in the renderer, or there was any error at all in the main process (which doesn't have devtools) it would just crash.

I'm not OP, but I've also used both and recently switched a production app from NW.js to Electron. I'm extremely happy with the decision to switch. Benefits of Electron: * Much more active development, more frequent releases, more quickly addressed bugs (this is huge) * More active ecosystem * Lower level API that requires you to perhaps do a bit more work to achieve the same cross-platform behavior but gives more control and fewer weird issues * Much better documentation * Much better error reporting. It may have just been me, but when I had a JS error in NW.js, the process would simply crash with no feedback whatsoever (which as you can imagine is infuriating). I opened a couple issues about it and never got any help or feedback. Electron pops up a dialog with a stack trace. Edit: * Another major difference is that NW.js uses a shared global object for communicating between the main process and renderer (BrowserWindow) processes. Electron uses evented message passing using an `ipc` (inter-process communication) module that makes for more robust code. * Besides being lower-level, the API is just (IMO) a lot better/more powerful in general

ronjouch 11y ago
Thanks!
z3t4 11y ago
About error reporting in nw.js, it's just like working with chrome (chromium), you see JS errors in: developer tools > console tab. You could probably send messages to a log instead of the developer tools (might require editing the nw.js source code).
- johnthedebs 11y ago
  Yeah, I should have been more clear. Regular JS in the renderer processes showed errors in the console as usual. However, if I tried using one of the NW.js APIs incorrectly in the renderer, or there was any error at all in the main process (which doesn't have devtools) it would just crash.