▶Book Description
The Electron framework allows you to use modern web technologies to build applications that share the same code across all operating systems and platforms. This also helps designers to easily transition from the web to the desktop. Electron Projects guides you through building cross-platform Electron apps with modern web technologies and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React.js, and Vue.js.
You'll explore the process of configuring modern JavaScript frameworks and UI libraries, real-time analytics and automatic updates, and interactions with the operating system. You'll get hands-on with building a basic Electron app, before moving on to implement a Markdown Editor. In addition to this, you'll be able to experiment with major JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and Vue.js, discovering ways to integrate them with Electron apps for building cross-platform desktop apps. Later, you'll learn to build a screenshot snipping tool, a mini-game, and a music player, while also gaining insights into analytics, bug tracking, and licensing. You'll then get to grips with building a chat app, an eBook generator and finally a simple digital wallet app.
By the end of this book, you'll have experience in building a variety of projects and project templates that will help you to apply your knowledge when creating your own cross-platform applications.
▶What You Will Learn
- Initialize Node.js, Node Package Manager (NPM), and JavaScript to set up your app
- Integrate Phaser with Electron to build a simple 2D game
- Improve app quality by adding an error tracking system and crash reports
- Implement group chat features and event handling capabilities using Firebase
- Integrate a WordPress-like rich-text editor into your app
- Build Electron applications using a single codebase
▶Key Features
- Use your web development skills with JavaScript and Node.js to build desktop applications for macOS and Windows
- Develop desktop versions of popular mobile applications that are similar to Slack, Spotify, and more
- Design desktop apps with automatic updates and real-time analytics capabilities
▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for JavaScript developers who want to explore the Electron framework for building desktop apps. Working knowledge of modern frontend JavaScript frameworks and Node.js is assumed. No prior knowledge of desktop development is required.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Building Your First Electron Application, prepares the environment and gets you started with Electron development.
- Chapter 2, Building a Markdown Editor, gets you familiar with the main building blocks of the typical Electron-based application.
- Chapter 3, Integrating with Angular, React, and Vue, covers modern frontend Javascript frameworks, such as Angular, React.js, and Vue.js, and explains how to integrate them with Electron apps to build cross-platform desktop applications that can share their code base with their website counterparts.
- Chapter 4, Building a Screenshot Snipping Tool, covers working with the native image capturing API in Electron, system tray integration, and keyboard handling.
- Chapter 5, Making a 2D Game, covers integrating a JavaScript-based game engine and handling game loops, loading external resources, and practicing communication between Main and Renderer processes.
- Chapter 6, Building a Music Player, covers building a simple desktop music player with playlist support and custom album art.
- Chapter 7, Analytics, Bug Tracking, and Licensing, gives essential information for developers that want to monitor Electron application in production, track errors and crashes, analyze a real-time user base, and more.
- Chapter 8, Building a Group Chat Application with Firebase, covers creating an Electron application with group chat features, integrating with Google Firebase services for mobile apps, configuring Google Authentication, and storing application data in the cloud.
- Chapter 9, Building an eBook Editor and Generator, covers creating a simple cross-platform book editor, utilizing Docker to generate PDF and ePub books, and previewing the resulting PDF files in the separate Electron windows.
- Chapter 10, Building a Digital Wallet for Desktops, covers developing a simple digital wallet application that integrates with external services and connecting to locally running servers.
