GitHub wants to bring its Web development technology to the desktop.
We’re self-aggrandizing this week’s GitHub Project of the Week with Electron, a framework of GitHub’s own making. Formerly known as Atom Shell, it is a cross-platform framework for creating desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS, based on the io.js and Chromium runtimes and used in GitHub’s Atom text editor.
Over the past two years, tech companies have used the framework to create a variety of applications, including the Spark Dev IDE for Apache Spark, Docker’s Kitematic OS X app, and Microsoft’s newly announced Visual Studio Code editor. Electron offers features such as automatic updates, crash reporting, Windows installers, debugging and profiling, and native menus and notifications exposed through JavaScript APIs.
“When we got started, our goal wasn’t just to support the needs of a text editor,” GitHub developer Kevin Sawicki wrote in a blog post. “We also wanted to create a straightforward framework that would allow people to use Web technologies to build cross-platform desktop apps with all of the native trimmings.”
The framework also offers application packaging and distribution, native Node.js modules, Selenium and WebDriver integrations for automated testing and support for the Chrome DevTools extension.
To get started with Electron, developers can download the prebuilt binary, or use the npm package manager to install the framework from the command line. More details are available here.
