4 ms·
The point you're actually making is that the decision to build a desktop app with Electron is almost always a business decision and not a technical one. If you
by solatic 10y ago
The point you're actually making is that the decision to build a desktop app with Electron is almost always a business decision and not a technical one. If you already have all this SPA code that you built, it's going to be cheaper to re-use it and provide the same UI to the end user that they already know from your SPA.
Forget for a second that the performance will be terrible because it's not native code. Forget for a second that a desktop application typically benefits from a more dense UI than a web application, and may benefit from such desktop-only UI features such as separate tooltip windows or OpenGL rendering (yes you can do that in a browser but come on it's not the same). The fact of the matter is that the beancounters typically care less about delivering the best possible UX and more about how their bottom line is going to be affected as they continue the corporate strategy of expending 20% of the effort to get 80% of the potential business benefit.
Electron was built for the beancounters. Not for the HN purists. Simple as that.
- vvanders 10y ago> Not for the HN purists. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I'll throw a great counter-example to you, Mattermost. It's a great open source project that uses Electron to build a client app for just about every single platform. Have you maintained a cross-platform app for Windows, OSX, and all the various flavor of linux? I have, it's hell. You have compiler differences, ui semantic differences and a litany of per-platform quirks. Does Electron solve every single use case? No. However in the cases where it makes sense it's a great tool.
- pjmlp 10y agoI also have, and would keep on using Java, Qt, wxWidgets than bothering with Electron, and I do have my share of web projects. Also for all the kids out there, Electron is the second coming of the MSHTML ActiveX engine. I didn't like it then, surely don't like it now.