Ask HN: Teach Me Electron.js | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Teach Me Electron.js

4 pointsAbhinav200010 comments

I'm really interested in learning Electron.Js for cross platform apps, but the official documentation is a bit hard to follow.

Any help would be appreciated! Are there any good tutorials? Is it possible to "lockdown" the Google Chrome engine in our electron apps so that future chrome changes don't break our apps? What is the process of developing - how do we launch our apps, compile our apps, change them and re launch?

I'm such a newbie in this space, any help would be much appreciated.

I really believe in the power of Electron -- even though it can be bloated, it lets us use the power of web browsers in our development. It also makes it easier to transition to a full blown web app later down the track. To me, its amazing :)

> Is it possible to "lockdown" the Google Chrome engine in our electron apps so that future chrome changes don't break our apps?

Don't upgrade the Electron version? Electron bundles it's own chromium. It won't auto upgrade on you unless you bump the Electron version.

> What is the process of developing - how do we launch our apps, compile our apps, change them and re launch?

If most of your code runs in the renderer process all the standard web reloading techniques should work similarly.

If you change the main process js you may have to restart or find some specific solution. But you probably won't be doing much in the main process.

The development workflow can be nearly identical to web dev. The most notable difference is you have access to Node APIs from the renderer process. Makes some things easier but also has security implications. Don't use any Electron specific features unless you need them and porting to web should be trivial.

Thanks - very helpful!

If you like go I'd recommend webview for go. Lot less bloat and seems viable. (Just started going though make some apps to test)

Other than that iirc there's tutorials on electron kn their repo

Thanks, will have a look

is this production ready?

Its "production" ready as there's minimal bugs and they are not actively developing new features. Docs are extremely thin tho.

No.

try out quasar.dev

quasar is great, love their docs!

Thanks

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