concept NW.js app in category electron

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Cross-Platform Desktop Applications: Using Node, Electron, and NW.js. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 1.7. The nw-builder tool can build native executables of an NW.js app for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Mac OS and Windows.

In an NW.js app, the app window is essentially like an embedded web browser, but with the distinct difference that the code inside the web page has access to the computer’s resources and can execute server-side code. There’s no separation of app state and responsibility. This means you can write code that’s calling out to DOM elements in the web page and executing server-side code accessing the computer’s filesystem in the same place. Not only that, you’ll be able to use npm modules in your code as well.

18.1.3. Building a .exe of an NW.js app for Windows

For this exercise, you’ll turn to one of the existing apps you built earlier in this book—a file explorer app called Lorikeet—and look at how to turn that into an executable app. In chapter 4, you covered generating a Windows version of the NW.js app using a tool called nw-builder. You could repeat that step here, but instead I’ll show you what’s going on when you create a binary executable of the app on Windows. That way, you can understand how the sausage is made, rather than getting the sausage and eating it.