6/12/2023 0 Comments Electron api with angularPowerful hardware can hide this drawback from the average user. The cross-platform applications made with Electron often become bloatware due to Electron’s critical performance issues mentioned above. In other words, applications built with Electron will take tons of physical memory and disk space.įurthermore, Electron applications drain your laptop’s battery quickly due to high resource consumption. While overall impressive, the Electron framework has several critical performance issues.Įlectron bundles Chromium and Node.js into the final application package, so even if you are writing a simple and lightweight application by carefully choosing frontend libraries and frameworks, your application will become bloated.Ĭhromium and Node.js are complex projects, and these modules will consume above-average resources on your computer. ![]() For example, Visual Studio Code, Teams, and Skype were built on top of Electron. Reputable companies such as Microsoft choose Electron for building their cross-platform applications. There are beneficial built-in features such as auto updates, too. Matured frameworkĮlectron was initially released about eight years ago, so it has a strong user base and community. Additionally, Node.js has a massive ecosystem of libraries so you can add native-like features very quickly. Rapid feature deliveryĬreating user interfaces with HTML and CSS in Electron is a piece of cake these web technologies give you the freedom to create any custom GUI element. Therefore, developers can maintain a single codebase for their cross-platform application that will run on most popular platforms. Nowadays, most developers make their cross-platform applications with Electron because of the following impressive advantages: Single codebaseĮlectron provides a flexible abstraction for native operating system features. We don’t need to worry about the platform-specific code because Electron has dialog box implementations for Linux, macOS, and Windows. If we need to show a message box, we can use the dialog.showMessageBox method from the Electron API. As mentioned, we can use Electron’s JavaScript API for handling required operating system features. Native features like file handling can be done with the help of Node.js. For example, we can use React and Material UI to build the frontend of the application. Electron integrated the Chromium project and Node.js into one bundle and exposed a generic JavaScript API for native features such as displaying dialog boxes, sending notifications, and creating notification and tray icons.ĭevelopers can create the GUI of the application with their preferred frontend framework and web UI toolkit. What is Electron?Įlectron (formerly known as Atom Shell) is a cross-platform application development framework created by GitHub. ![]() I will also show you how to install and use these frameworks. In this article, I will be discussing two alternatives to Electron: Tauri and Neutralino.js. ![]() However, Electron applications consume above average resources on user’s computers, which means many developers are looking for lightweight Electron alternatives. Moreover, Electron has a full-featured API for native system operations. Also, they could make custom GUI controls easily with HTML and CSS. Developers could build highly flexible and user friendly GUIs with their favorite frontend frameworks. Even though there were some generic APIs to build cross-platform applications, creating custom GUI elements was difficult.Įlectron introduced a new way to develop cross-platform desktop applications with one codebase and web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). Shalitha Suranga Follow Programmer | Author of Neutralino.js | Technical Writer Why you should use an Electron alternativeīefore the Electron project, cross-platform desktop application development was not particularly easy, because developers often had to maintain separate codebases for each operating system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |