Foreword

The Electron framework was born in 2013, when Node.js was just becoming popular. The community was excited about JavaScript running on both the client and server sides, and there were various attempts to write desktop apps using JavaScript.

I was excited about JavaScript, too, and GUI programming was my favorite area. I wrote a few modules for Node.js to provide bindings for popular GUI toolkits with JavaScript, but they were no better than existing tools and didn’t attract much attention.

Then I found an interesting Node.js module called node-webkit: a simple module that could insert Node.js into WebKit browsers. I had the idea of using it to develop a full-featured desktop framework: I could use Chromium to display web pages as windows, and then use Node.js to control everything!

Development for node-webkit was inactive at that time, so I took over and rewrote the module to make it a complete framework for desktop apps. When I had finished my initial development, it worked incredibly well for small, cross-platform apps.

In the meantime, GitHub was secretly developing the web technology–based Atom editor and was eager to replace Atom’s subpar web runtime with a better tool. GitHub tried to migrate Atom to node-webkit but encountered many problems; I met with the developers, and we agreed that I would write a new framework for writing desktop apps with browser techniques and Node.js, and help them migrate Atom to it.