Electron in Action: What is it?

[Johnny Miller]

What in the world is Electron and what's the hype ?

[Carl Byrd]

Electron appears to be a multi-platform framework to develop desktop applications. You use web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to develop. This is new to me too. I'm hoping someone else can elaborate further.

[Paul Anilprem]

You can check out this YouTube video to know the basics

[charles ross]

Electron is cool because you write a desktop app in HTML and Javascript and in theory the app will run on Windows, Mac, Linux. It is essentially a local web server (Node) and you make your desktop UI with web pages.  

This is how Github provides Atom and Microsoft is able to support VS Code on all 3 platforms.

The heartbreak of it is that writing Electron menu code still depends in varying degrees on the desktop OS.

There are tons of NPM and other JS packages/libraries that you can glue together to build a desktop app with. Node/NPM in theory promotes small software tools that do a job in the unix commands spirit. I was able to follow a tutorial (a broken tutorial) to build a Markdown Editor that uses the Ace JS editor and some other packages. See https://github.com/chilismaug/wd-markdown-reborn