Electron in Action

376 Pages·2018·14.74 MB·English

by  Steve Kinney

Steve Kinney
M A N N I N G
Electron in Action

Electron in Action
STEVEN KINNEY
MANNING
SHELTER ISLAND
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ISBN: 9781617294143
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This book is dedicated to my wife, Logan, and my sons, Wes and Jack.
You are the loves of my life.

brief contents
PART 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ELECTRON..............................1
1 ■ Introducing Electron 3
2 ■ Your first Electron application 17
PART 2 BUILDING CROSS-PLATFORM APPLICATIONS
WITH ELECTRON.........................................................45
3 ■ Building a notes application 47
4 ■ Using native file dialog boxes and facilitating
interprocess communication 65
5 ■ Working with multiple windows 87
6 ■ Working with files 98
7 ■ Building application and context menus 123
8 ■ Further operating system integration and
dynamically enabling menu items 143
9 ■ Introducing the tray module 159
10 ■ Building applications with the menubar library 181
11 ■ Using transpilers and frameworks 199
vii
viii BRIEF CONTENTS
12 ■ Persisting use data and using native Node.js modules 222
13 ■ Testing applications with Spectron 243
PART 3 DEPLOYING ELECTRON APPLICATIONS .......................257
14 ■ Building applications for deployment 259
15 ■ Releasing and updating applications 272
16 ■ Distributing your application through
the Mac App Store 293
contents
preface xvii
acknowledgments xix
about this book xxi
about the cover illustration xxv
PART 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ELECTRON ....................1
1 Introducing Electron 3
1.1 What is Electron? 4
What is the Chromium Content Module? 5 ■ What is Node.js? 6
1.2 Who’s using Electron? 6
1.3 What do I need to know? 8
1.4 Why should I use Electron? 8
Building on your existing skill set 9 ■ Access to native operating
system APIs 10 ■ Enhanced privileges and looser restrictions 10
Accessing Node from the browser context 13 ■ Offline first 13
1.5 How does Electron work? 13
The main process 14 ■ Renderer processes 14
1.6 Electron vs. NW.js 15
ix