Universal API library for desktop frameworks (Electron, nw.js)

[petrbrzek]

There are two main frameworks for building desktop apps in web technologies:

• Electron
• nw.js

Motivation

We've been using Electron before it was even renamed to it and we love it. It helps us to quickly build and ship our desktop app to all platforms. One problem we've encountered lately is that Electron has fallen significantly behind Chromium. Electron 2 is based on Chromium 61 which was released almost a year ago (September 5, 2017). On the other hand, Nw.js updates are much faster (it uses Chromium 67 + Node 10.6.0 at the time of writing). I was thinking about migrating to Nw.js because of this (we are still using Electron 1.7.x as it's more stable than newer versions). We haven't switched yet as it'd take us at least a month, but we got an idea to create something like jQuery for desktop frameworks.

Problem

It's not straightforward to easily switch from Electron to nw.js and vice-versa. Also, it's not probably possible to unify 100% of API but still the basics should be possible.

[rogerwang]

Thanks for the idea. It should be very useful and will benefit all the developers in the desktop JS field. It should be a good start with listing the common features of the 2 projects.

btw, we have been seeing a constant stream of Electron applications moving to NW.js. A notable one of them is the official IDE of WeChat Program, which serves more than 1,000,000 programs.

[nektro]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[nektro]

This is a much deeper issue that Operating System and Windowing System developers need to come together and solve. There's needs to be a POSIX for making GUIs