Why we used How Electronfor desktop application development?
Our project has a component to show a user interface for the students who use maker space using a touch screen. Our initial plan was to use a raspberry pi as a mini computer connected to a touch screen. Options we had to develop the UI is using a web application hosted in cloud (department server) or using a standalone application to install on Raspberry Pi.
Of course we had a concern about our knowledge on different technologies to design the UI. Since all the members in the team are comfortable with web designing, the preferred way is to go with a web application. Here comes the problem. We should keep space for future integrations and developments. We need to have more control on operating system level processes, but web applications have limitations over that area.
Therefore we need a web designing framework, but as a standalone application. Then we found that the only such option with a good documentation is “Electron”. We used Express JS server serving EJS templates embedded inside an Electron application. EJS templates are handy to use just with the knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS.
