Starting with Windows, most people rely on C#, C++, Visual Basic, and .NET libraries. Then, for macOS, you need to learn about the Cocoa layer, Media layer, Core Services, BSD Library, and a lot of other things to develop a desktop app. Lastly, Linux requires Python or other libraries for user interface and OpenGL for services like 2D and 3D rendering. Read: 5 Best Frameworks for Desktop Application Development
A Major Problem with Conventional Desktop Application Development
As you can see each platform requires knowledge of different technologies and frameworks to build desktop applications. But the companies need to cope with the fast and constantly changing tech industry. It means if you are running a business and want to increase the sales of your product and expand your reach, your product must be available on all the platforms with a single codebase, support for upcoming features, and a user-friendly interface. Now, if you go with the conventional methods, you will have to spend a lot of money and time on developing cross-platform versions of your product, and here the concept of ElectronJS comes in.
What is ElectronJS?
Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You don’t need any specific skills to work with ElectronJS. If you can build a website, you can also build a desktop app. Electron is open-source and uses Chromium and Node.js. it’s a JavaScript-based framework that uses popular web technologies and allows you to develop cross-platform desktop apps easily. Popular applications like Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Atom Editor were also built using ElectronJS. Also Read: Difference Between Frameworks and Libraries in Computer Science
Reasons to Use ElectronJS For Desktop Application Development
1. Improved Performance
Performance is one of the most important things that no one likes to compromise. ElectronJS provides more useful options and saves a lot of time. If you take care while the development and ensure that only the needed component is loaded into the application, ElectronJS can show some great performance improvements than native applications. However, there are some people who say ElectronJS is memory hungry, but that’s only if you develop the application without following the above advice.
2. Better Security
If you have ever been involved in application migration or are aware of its procedure, you know how much people take care of the security. But with ElectronJS, we are creating a desktop application whose data remains locally in the system and thus you won’t have to think even twice before migrating your existing application to ElectronJS. But in case you need to store data in the cloud, just check whether your cloud network is equipped with security functions and offer solutions if anything goes wrong.
3. Low-Level and Hardware Accessibility
ElectronJS provides almost all the functionalities required to build basic desktops apps. It allows you to add interactive and useful features such as Keyboard Shortcuts and low-level access to the hardware and operating system components. If you are building an app on ElectronJS, you will get complete access to hardware-level access API’s using JavaScript/Plugin.
4. Easy Code Management
With ElectronJS, you are free from worries of maintaining different codebases and teams for each platform. The developers can easily fix the bugs and ensure it will never show on other platforms. You won’t have to reaudit the product to verify that it has the same functionality across all the platforms. However, I will still suggest you keep an eye on the OS level functionalities.
5. Development Cost and Time
As per my experience, the development time depends on the frameworks we use, how popular they are, and their support. If you get the solution of the issues fastly while developing and strongly believe in code reusability by using open source libraries, you will save a lot of time and money. As with ElectronJS, you are only working on a single codebase, there’s no need to hire developers for each platform. Actually, the requirements decrease a lot with this JavaScript framework and hence time and cost. Also Read: Best Courses to Learn JavaScript Programming Online
Final Words:
I hope this article gave you an idea of how ElectronJS can help you in speeding up the development and decreasing cost and time. If you are running a product or service business and your availability is limited to a single platform, it’s time to expand your reach and make your presence on all the platforms. So that more and more people can know about you and ultimately become your customer.
