Electron meetup at Microsoft
November 06, 2015 | Jeff Weinstein
Electron has momentum. The open source project for building cross platform desktop apps with web technologies now has 6000+ commits from 200+ contributors, a 3500+ person Slack room, and now it’s 4th meetup with 90+ RSVPs (the 1st was a few of us at a bar).
On Monday, the Bay Area Electron group met at Microsoft Reactor, an event space in San Francisco. A few members of Microsoft’s open source team were in town to hear how people are using Electron to build Windows apps. The team is dedicated to helping projects run well with Microsoft platforms. It’s also exciting to see that Visual Studio Code is using Electron. Two of the five talks were Windows related:
Kevin Sawicki from GitHub spoke about how to test Electron apps using ChromeDriver and his project Spectron. Try this in your next project.
Felix Rieseberg from Microsoft’s open source team gave us walkthrough of WinJS. It seems like a great way to make Electron apps look native on Windows 10. Here are the slides.
John Haley from Axosoft’s GitKraken team talked about how they handle task scheduling in their Electron apps. This strategy seems like a new standard way to handle both UI and processing intensive applications.
Wagon’s Matt DeLand presented a few tips and tricks for developing, building, and deploying on Windows along with a demo of our latest version. Sign up for early access to try Wagon on Windows.
Edgar Aroutiounian gave a quick demo of how he used OCaml to build an Electron app. Checkout the example project here.
Special thanks to Microsoft for hosting. We’re excited the Electron community is growing and that large companies are adopting and supporting this platform. See you at the next event!