Electron considered harmful

Re:Electron considered harmful by mateuszf on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:07PM (#13031727)

But then you can't share the same code between your web application and desktop application. As a company you would have to pay two separate teams to develop each - developer time is expensive. Yes - electron apps are slower and eat more ram - but someone else is paying for that.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by RandomOpinion on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:00PM (#13032728)

>Yes - electron apps are slower and eat more ram - but someone else is paying for that.

Not that there aren't a lot of posts here defending Electron that basically say the same thing but don't you feel embarrassed in the slightest for saying that?

Yes, there's a lot of things we, as coders, can do to make our lives more convenient by treating bandwidth, RAM, and CPU wastage as an externality that can be shoved off onto the end-user to pay for. That doesn't mean we should.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by mateuszf on Saturday November 26, 2016 @09:07AM (#13043528)

I'm playing devils advocate here. It doesn't mean this is my way of thinking.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by Splines on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:49PM (#13032043)

> Yes - electron apps are slower and eat more ram - but someone else is paying for that.

I hope you're being facetious here. If you develop any kind of desktop application and truly believe this, honestly this is disappointing to read.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by dagw on Friday November 25, 2016 @09:41AM (#13036986)

Doing something quick and dirty in electron takes N hours. Doing a 'proper' cross platform native app the right way takes N+P hours. If people are willing to pay for those extra P hours then I'd be more than happy to do things the 'right' way. However almost nobody is.

I've spent a lot of time on team web-apps-suck, and in many ways I'm still a casual fan. But the truth is I can go from zero to good enough much faster with web apps than anything else, and unfortunately most people only want to pay for good enough.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by groovy2shoes on Thursday December 01, 2016 @01:42AM (#13077663)

> Doing something quick and dirty in electron takes N hours. Doing a 'proper' cross platform native app the right way takes N+P hours.

Source?

Really, I'm not at all convinced that whipping up an Electron app is inherently quicker than whipping up a native app. Especially when we have robust, mature RAD tools for native toolkits, and things like Qt Quick, WPF, and Java FX let you go the whole "write your GUI in some markup language" route, if that's your bag.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by bryanrasmussen on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:24PM (#13032223)

well if the developers or company don't actually use the app then their users are the ones paying for the ram, aren't they?

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Re:Electron considered harmful by alexchamberlain on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:23PM (#13031849)

Should you be sharing that code? Should there be any business logic in the UI, or should it be pushed back into services that can be shared across both?

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Re:Electron considered harmful by mateuszf on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:47PM (#13032027)

Maybe not all the code, but you can share lot of the UI behaviour, which is usually quite complicated. This kind of sharing allows you to to have a very similar experience in both places too.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivan_gammel on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:49PM (#13032040)

Valid argument, but only in case if that web app exists. But if it exists and you want to share the code, there's no point in using Electron or building a desktop app at all: you can just create a shortcut on the desktop or even turn it into offline web app in Chrome.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by bryanrasmussen on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:27PM (#13032238)

not really, there can be lots of reuse of code between the two apps without them being exactly the same. Reuse of major parts of your codebase have been a business case for many years, without requiring that you reuse all that codebase.

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