What is "electron"

Electron (previously known as Atom Shell) was originally started by Cheng Zhao, one of the authors of NW.js (formerly known as Node-Webkit), another Node.js-based platform for building desktop applications using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Cheng Zhao was hired by Github and started working on framework on 11 April 2013. On 17 April 2015 (UTC), with the release of version 0.24 framework was renamed Atom Shell to Electron.

One difference between the frameworks Electron and NW.js is the entry point for the application. In Electron a Javascript file is currently used when sending an HTML page as in NW.js. This makes the Electron more suitable for testing with the Phantomjs.

Another difference is in the construction process that is simpler in the Electron. Electron uses the libchromiumcontent to access the Chromium’s Content API, which makes it not necessary to obtain a copy of the Chromium source code. In this case, the integration with Chromium is much more weakly coupled compared to NW.js (which needs Chromium to be compiled and maintained separately by NW.js developers).

Probably the most popular application developed with Electron is the text editor "customizable" Atom (also of Github). But there are also other interesting projects like Vivaldi Web browser, Mapbox Studio, a Nylas (N1) email client, the Slack desktop app, Pixate, Fireball game editor, Visual Studio Code, an SQL editor called Wagon, a unified Facebook IDE called Nuclide, a Mac app that runs Docker containers called Kitematic.

Useful links:

Official website: http://electron.atom.io.

Documentation in Portuguese: https://www.gitbook.com/book/imfly/electron-docs-gitbook/details/pt-BR

List of useful features: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-electron.

Wiki translated from the tag on Soen (http://stackoverflow.com/tags/electron/info)