Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard ...

developed and maintained by

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

. The framework is designed to create desktop applications using web technologies (mainly

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, although other technologies such as front-end frameworks and

Web Assembly WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment ...

are possible) that are rendered using a version of the Chromium browser engine and a back end using the

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

runtime environment. It also uses various APIs to enable functionality such as native integration with Node.js services and an

inter-process communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categori ...

module. Electron was originally built for

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...

and is the main GUI framework behind several open-source projects including

GitHub Desktop GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

, Light Table,

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code complet ...

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

Desktop and

Eclipse Theia Eclipse Theia is a free and open-source framework for building IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies. Theia-based applications can be deployed as desktop and web applications. It is implemented in TypeScript, is based on Visual Studio ...

Architecture

Electron applications include a "main" process and several "renderer" processes. The main process runs the logic for the application (e. g. menus, shell commands, lifecycle events), and can then launch multiple renderer processes by instantiating an instance of the class, which loads a window that appears on the screen by rendering

and

. Both the main and renderer processes can run with Node.js integration if the field in the main process is set to . Most of Electron's APIs are written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTS ...

and are exposed directly to the application code through

bindings.

History

In September 2021, Electron moved to an eight-week release cycle between major versions to match the release cycle of

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...

Extended Stable and to comply with a new requirement from the

Microsoft Store Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform apps ...

that requires browser-based apps to be within two major versions of the latest release of the browser engine. Electron frequently releases new major versions along every other

release. The latest three stable version are support by the Electron team.

Reception

Desktop applications built with Electron include

, balenaEtcher,

Microsoft Teams Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencin ...

, Slack and

Brave Browser Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which automatically blocks online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. ...

was based on Electron before it was rewritten to use Chromium directly. The most common criticism of Electron is that it necessitates

software bloat Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious use ...

when used for simple programs. As a result,

Michael Larabel Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is a free and open-source benchmark software for Linux and other operating systems which is developed by Michael Larabel and Matthew Tippett. The Phoronix Test Suite has been endorsed by sites such as Linux.com, Linux ...

has referred to the framework as "notorious among most Linux desktop users for being resource heavy, not integrating well with most desktops, and generally being despised." Meanwhile, Joey Sneddon states that this tradeoff is sensible as Electron greatly lowers the cost of developing and maintaining cross-platform software. Researchers have shown that Electron's large feature set can be hijacked by malicious software because it is accessed through plaintext JavaScript files. Those who are concerned that Electron is not always based on the newest version of Chromium have recommended

progressive web application A progressive web application (PWA), commonly known as a progressive web app, is a type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. It is intended to wor ...

s as an alternative.

References

External links

* {{Microsoft FOSS 2013 software Cross-platform desktop-apps development Cross-platform software Free and open-source software GitHub Google Chrome Microsoft free software Software using the MIT license

Architecture

History

Reception

See also

References

External links