Desktop development with Electron

Question

With the growth of web many people have abandoned desktop development, but some interesting technologies have emerged, such as the Electron:

Electron allows you to create desktop applications with pure Javascript through of a Runtime with rich and native Apis. You can see this as a variation of the io.js Runtime which is focused on desktop applications instead web-based Servers.

In view of this some doubts have arisen:

1. What are the positive and negative points when developing with Electron? I mean, where he stands out?

2. Since the development with Electron is based on web technology this may interfere with application performance desktop? Or would be an advantage?

Answer 1

Positives:

1. Developers already familiar with web languages will not need to learn a new language.
2. Applications do not depend on internet to work. Very good when the internet is slow or does not exist. Or even for cases where the internet drops.
3. Applications that run locally run faster and will not overload the server in many client cases.
4. Web applications depend on browser (and this is very annoying, who develops for web knows), in this case this problem is eliminated. You don’t have to worry which browser the client will use.

Negative Points:

1. Desktop developers have to learn web languages to develop.
2. You don’t have components ready the way you have desktop. Although this scenario is changing with some CSS/JS frameworks.
3. You don’t have RAD’s IDE to drag components ready and develop system screens.
4. The result is a desktop application and has its problems like updating the version among others.

---

The biggest problem is access to local computer resources. Web languages (normal) But it is possible that these frameworks offer resources for this.