Developing desktop applications in Node.js with Electron

Serious security hole found in Electron framework, Electron app's can be easily backdoored

(Wed Aug 07 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) An attacker that can gain access to a machine can easily patch an Electron application to run bad code that does bad things. The problem is Electron does not secure the contents of ASAR files, and they can be easily opened and modified.

A file-system browser component for Electron/Vue.js applications

(Mon Jul 30 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Many kinds of applications need to browse files in the file system. For example most programmers text editors (I'm writing this in Microsoft Visual Studio Code) include a sidebar showing the file-system. Therefore it's important to have such a component to use in Electron/Vue.js applications. In this article we'll look at one way to implement such a component.

Use Electron-Vue to build Electron/Vue.js application with Bootstrap v4 -- DISRECOMMENDED

(Sat Jun 30 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Using Vue.js in an Electron app means dealing with using Webpack to build/package the components and other assets. The most effective way to put this together is the Electron-Vue package, which builds itself as "Boilerplate for making electron applications built with Vue.js". What that means is Electron-Vue is a pre-built application template and build infrastructure to simplify running Electron/Vue applications in development mode, and to package Electron/Vue applications for distribution.

Quickly start a new Electron and Vue.js application project,

(Thu Jun 28 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) It's relatively easy to setup a blank Electron application, but of course the modern best practice is to use an application framework when creating an HTML+JavaScript application. The Electron development model more-or-less-exactly matches the model in regular web browsers. That means we can use a framework like React or Vue.js to make a powerful Electron app. In this tutorial we'll set up a simple Electron app, then add to it a simple bit of Vue.js code, and see that it is pretty simple to bring the two together.

Quickly start a new Electron software project

(Wed Jun 20 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) If Electron encapsulates the Chromium web browser to support running GUI applications, isn't it a complex platform to use? Isn't it complex to get started with Electron? Yes, there is a fair amount of complexity under the hood of Electron. Electron really is the guts of the Google Chrome web browser, encapsulated in a Node.js runtime, letting Node.js programmers easily develop desktop GUI applications using web technology. That was a mouthfull to describe, and getting a fully polished application up and running has some complexity. Thanks to starter projects maintained by the Electron team, getting a skeleton application running is quick.

Electron considered harmful because it rides on Chromium

(Sun Sep 24 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time))

Electron is perhaps the greatest gift to cross platform application development in ages. I've been working on cross platform application development for over 20 years, with over 10 years spent IN the Java SE team at Sun. Today I'm a happy Node.js developer, and have spent the last couple months learning Electron and am totally enjoying the application-writing experience in Electron. It is so easy and quick to develop desktop applications using a repurposed web browser. Development is fast and intuitive, assuming you're familiar with HTML and CSS and JavaScript website development.

But a nagging thought came to mind yesterday. That Electron application requires running a large portion of the Chrome web browser. Meaning, my laptop not only has the regular Chrome browser running, but another in GitKraken, another in Visual Studio Code (and I'd been running Atom before discovering VSCode), and yet another for the application I'm developing. That's four Chrome instances, and the result simply is not scalable. Each additional running Electron-based app causes a whole new Chrome instance to exist. Is Electron an unscalable mess?

Loading jQuery and Bootstrap in Electron app has a curious bug

(Sat Sep 02 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) What about using jQuery/Bootstrap to design an Electron app? It's easy to get started, right? You just load the jQuery and Bootstrap JavaScript libraries in that order. The process is well documented on the Bootstrap website, and since Electron is a web browser the same technique should work. But -- you get an inscrutible error that jQuery needs to be loaded. Which is odd because the HTML does indeed load jQuery, and in the Developer tools you can inspect the loaded files and see that jQuery is loaded. WTF?

Message send from Electron Main process not received by Renderer

(Sun Aug 13 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Sending messages between Electron's main process and the Renderer looks simple. In the Renderer you use ipcRenderer to send a message to the main process, and in the main process you use windowObject.webContents.send to send the message. But what about when the process doesn't work and the documentation doesn't make it clear what to do?