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having built both native and electron my experience is it's an order of magnitude faster to use electron to ship on win/Mac/Linux than any native tech clone th

having built both native and electron my experience is it's an order of magnitude faster to use electron to ship on win/Mac/Linux than any native tech clone this repo, follow steps at bottom of readme, ship on 3 platforms https://github.com/greggman/electron-hello-world https://github.com/greggman/electron-hello-world

jarjoura 9y ago
Every single platform has their 1-line hello world example. iOS has storyboards, Windows has XAML, Linux has QT components. If all you need is an action button to trigger some underlying code, then those hello-world products are very simple. Electron is NOT that easy to use of a platform. In fact, it's quite technical and requires a lot of knowledge about node and HTML/CSS. It requires that the developer understand you're running a node process that feeds its results to a browser that has a native chrome. Visual Studio Code and Slack for example have native plugins that light-up the various platform's features. So you're never completely guarded from having to write native code. At the end of the day it's just another UI toolkit and language choice you can make when building out your software.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > it's quite technical and requires a lot of knowledge about node and HTML/CSS HTML/CSS are already something with massive widespread know-how and insane numbers of online resources. That's a huge deal. This takes every web developer and makes them a cross-platform desktop app developer with no additional learning.
  - jarjoura 9y ago
    To a point that is correct. For simple button actions that trigger a web request and display content, I would agree the knowledge is there and available. For any deeper skillset, photo manipulation, live camera, geospatial or map related code, webgl, etc. Solutions in those spaces are just as undocumented on any platform and require a sophisticated developer to write complex code to solve. A developer with the caliber required to solve those problems will be comfortable in any language they are asked to write in.
- cageface 9y ago
  Every single platform has their 1-line hello world example. iOS has storyboards, Windows has XAML, Linux has QT components. The point is that Electron is cross platform. Building three different native apps with completely different UI toolkits is a huge amount of work and depends on much less common skillsets.
  - jarjoura 9y ago
    Sure, until you hit a wall with the sandbox. Then you will have to write native code to enable features only available on the platform that the application is run on.
    - cageface 9y ago
      Maybe but the UI is the lion's share of the code for most of these apps so you start way ahead.

jarjoura 9y ago

Every single platform has their 1-line hello world example. iOS has storyboards, Windows has XAML, Linux has QT components. If all you need is an action button to trigger some underlying code, then those hello-world products are very simple. Electron is NOT that easy to use of a platform. In fact, it's quite technical and requires a lot of knowledge about node and HTML/CSS. It requires that the developer understand you're running a node process that feeds its results to a browser that has a native chrome. Visual Studio Code and Slack for example have native plugins that light-up the various platform's features. So you're never completely guarded from having to write native code. At the end of the day it's just another UI toolkit and language choice you can make when building out your software.

bpicolo 9y ago
> it's quite technical and requires a lot of knowledge about node and HTML/CSS HTML/CSS are already something with massive widespread know-how and insane numbers of online resources. That's a huge deal. This takes every web developer and makes them a cross-platform desktop app developer with no additional learning.
- jarjoura 9y ago
  To a point that is correct. For simple button actions that trigger a web request and display content, I would agree the knowledge is there and available. For any deeper skillset, photo manipulation, live camera, geospatial or map related code, webgl, etc. Solutions in those spaces are just as undocumented on any platform and require a sophisticated developer to write complex code to solve. A developer with the caliber required to solve those problems will be comfortable in any language they are asked to write in.
cageface 9y ago
Every single platform has their 1-line hello world example. iOS has storyboards, Windows has XAML, Linux has QT components. The point is that Electron is cross platform. Building three different native apps with completely different UI toolkits is a huge amount of work and depends on much less common skillsets.
- jarjoura 9y ago
  Sure, until you hit a wall with the sandbox. Then you will have to write native code to enable features only available on the platform that the application is run on.
  - cageface 9y ago
    Maybe but the UI is the lion's share of the code for most of these apps so you start way ahead.