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We've been busy developing a product with atom-shell that will be released next year. Works great, no complaints so far anyway!

kartikkumar 12y ago
Nice! I have been looking for an easy way to build a reliable desktop app for some scientific computing code that I've written, so I've been exploring various options, including using node and the Qt libraries. Feels like a bit of a maze at the moment, so I'm not entirely sure which way to go, but I like the look of Atom Shell. I'd love to hear a bit more about your experiences using it. The discussion on HN about a recent blog post comparing various HTML+CSS+JS solutions to building desktop apps was definitely insightful [1]. I'm also looking at using something like Atom Shell as a way for me to build a project that would allow me to kickstart my JS learning curve. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729791
saidajigumi 12y ago
Would you mind sharing the sweet spots that have caused atom-shell to be a good fit for your application?
- frankwiles 12y ago
  Sure, we built the prototype with Python, Django, and a web interface. The idea being a user could run it and then just browse to localhost:<some port> and use the web UI for it. We quickly realized the app was going to be 99% Javascript anyway so using something like atom-shell started to make a lot of sense. We originally were targeting just OSX and Linux desktops, but using atom-shell opens up a path to Windows desktops much more easily for us. The app needs to display a large of amount of changing data from the local machine and atom-shell + ReactJS, so far, is handling it just fine.
  - ioedward 12y ago
    So are you still shipping Python/Django as an executable with atom-shell? Or is this purely client-side javascript?
    - frankwiles 12y ago
      Just atom-shell, it ended up being easier all around and no compelling reason to keep Python in the mix for this particular app.
  - emehrkay 12y ago
    It is possible to include python with this? That is interesting

kartikkumar 12y ago

Nice! I have been looking for an easy way to build a reliable desktop app for some scientific computing code that I've written, so I've been exploring various options, including using node and the Qt libraries. Feels like a bit of a maze at the moment, so I'm not entirely sure which way to go, but I like the look of Atom Shell. I'd love to hear a bit more about your experiences using it. The discussion on HN about a recent blog post comparing various HTML+CSS+JS solutions to building desktop apps was definitely insightful [1]. I'm also looking at using something like Atom Shell as a way for me to build a project that would allow me to kickstart my JS learning curve. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729791

saidajigumi 12y ago

Would you mind sharing the sweet spots that have caused atom-shell to be a good fit for your application?

frankwiles 12y ago
Sure, we built the prototype with Python, Django, and a web interface. The idea being a user could run it and then just browse to localhost:<some port> and use the web UI for it. We quickly realized the app was going to be 99% Javascript anyway so using something like atom-shell started to make a lot of sense. We originally were targeting just OSX and Linux desktops, but using atom-shell opens up a path to Windows desktops much more easily for us. The app needs to display a large of amount of changing data from the local machine and atom-shell + ReactJS, so far, is handling it just fine.
- ioedward 12y ago
  So are you still shipping Python/Django as an executable with atom-shell? Or is this purely client-side javascript?
  - frankwiles 12y ago
    Just atom-shell, it ended up being easier all around and no compelling reason to keep Python in the mix for this particular app.
- emehrkay 12y ago
  It is possible to include python with this? That is interesting