21 lines
980 B
Markdown
21 lines
980 B
Markdown
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# Electron
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[Electron](https://www.electronjs.org) is a cross-platform (Linux, Windows,
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macOS) way for creating desktop apps using TypeScript.
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Electron embeds Chromium and Node.js in the generated app's binary. The
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generated app thus consists of two separate processes - the _main_ process, and
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a _renderer_ process.
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* The _renderer_ process is a regular web app that gets loaded into the embedded
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Chromium. In our case, we build a static export of the [Photos web
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app](../web/README.md) and bundle it in the generated app's binary - at
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runtime, the embedded Chromium loads this.
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* The _main_ process is runs the embedded Node.js. This code can deal with the
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host OS - it is conceptually like a `node` repl running on your machine. In our
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case, the TypeScript code (in the `src/` directory) gets transpiled by `tsc`
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into JavaScript in the `app/` directory, which gets bundled in the generated
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app's binary and is loaded by the `node` (main) process when it starts.
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y
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