Atom Under The Microscope Electron & Atomic Force Microscopy What is an Atom? Essentially, an atom is the smallest unit of an element that retains the properties of the same element (iron, copper, carbon etc). This means that divided further, its components (electrons, protons, and neutrons) do not retain the properties of the element. In chemistry and atomic physics, an electron shell may be thought of as an orbit followed by electrons around an atom's nucleus.The closest shell to the nucleus is called the '1 shell' (also called the 'K shell'), followed by the '2 shell' (or 'L shell'), then the '3 shell' (or 'M shell'), and so on farther and farther from the nucleus. Electron javascript atom editor windows macos linux JavaScript MIT 16,013 54,879 639 (5 issues need help) 124 Updated Apr 23, 2021. Language-html HTML package for Atom CoffeeScript 141 106 25 7 Updated Apr 23, 2021. Language-json JSON package for Atom CoffeeScript 49 32 4.
Quickstart
Electron is a framework that enables you to create desktop applications with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. These applications can then be packaged to run directly on macOS, Windows, or Linux, or distributed via the Mac App Store or the Microsoft Store.
Typically, you create a desktop application for an operating system (OS) using each operating system's specific native application frameworks. Electron makes it possible to write your application once using technologies that you already know.
Prerequisites
Before proceeding with Electron you need to install Node.js.We recommend that you install either the latest LTS
or Current
version available.
Please install Node.js using pre-built installers for your platform.You may encounter incompatibility issues with different development tools otherwise.
To check that Node.js was installed correctly, type the following commands in your terminal client:
The commands should print the versions of Node.js and npm accordingly.If both commands succeeded, you are ready to install Electron.
Create a basic application
From a development perspective, an Electron application is essentially a Node.js application. This means that the starting point of your Electron application will be a package.json
file like in any other Node.js application. A minimal Electron application has the following structure:
Let's create a basic application based on the structure above.
Install Electron
Create a folder for your project and install Electron there:
Create the main script file
The main script specifies the entry point of your Electron application (in our case, the main.js
file) that will run the Main process. Typically, the script that runs in the Main process controls the lifecycle of the application, displays the graphical user interface and its elements, performs native operating system interactions, and creates Renderer processes within web pages. An Electron application can have only one Main process.
The main script may look as follows:
What is going on above?
- Line 1: First, you import the
app
andBrowserWindow
modules of theelectron
package to be able to manage your application's lifecycle events, as well as create and control browser windows. - Line 2: Second, you import the
path
package which provides utility functions for file paths. - Line 4: After that, you define a function that creates a new browser window with a preload script, loads
index.html
file into this window (line 13, we will discuss the file later). - Line 16: You create a new browser window by invoking the
createWindow
function once the Electron application is initialized. - Line 18: You add a new listener that creates a new browser window only if when the application has no visible windows after being activated. For example, after launching the application for the first time, or re-launching the already running application.
- Line 25: You add a new listener that tries to quit the application when it no longer has any open windows. This listener is a no-op on macOS due to the operating system's window management behavior.
Create a web page
This is the web page you want to display once the application is initialized. This web page represents the Renderer process. You can create multiple browser windows, where each window uses its own independent Renderer. You can optionally grant access to additional Node.js APIs by exposing them from your preload script.
The index.html
page looks as follows:
Define a preload script
Your preload script (in our case, the preload.js
file) acts as a bridge between Node.js and your web page. It allows you to expose specific APIs and behaviors to your web page rather than insecurely exposing the entire Node.js API. In this example we will use the preload script to read version information from the process
object and update the web page with that info.
What's going on above?
- On line 1: First you define an event listener that tells you when the web page has loaded
- On line 2: Second you define a utility function used to set the text of the placeholders in the
index.html
- On line 7: Next you loop through the list of components whose version you want to display
- On line 8: Finally, you call
replaceText
to look up the version placeholders inindex.html
and set their text value to the values fromprocess.versions
Modify your package.json file
Your Electron application uses the package.json
file as the main entry point (as any other Node.js application). The main script of your application is main.js
, so modify the package.json
file accordingly:
NOTE: If the main
field is omitted, Electron will attempt to load an index.js
file from the directory containing package.json
.
NOTE: The author
and description
fields are required for packaging, otherwise error will occur when running npm run make
.
By default, the npm start
command will run the main script with Node.js. To run the script with Electron, you need to change it as such:
Run your application
Your running Electron app should look as follows:
Package and distribute the application
Electron Atomic Mass
The simplest and the fastest way to distribute your newly created app is usingElectron Forge.
Import Electron Forge to your app folder:
Create a distributable:
Electron-forge creates the
out
folder where your package will be located:
Learning the basics
This section guides you through the basics of how Electron works under the hood. It aims at strengthening knowledge about Electron and the application created earlier in the Quickstart section.
Application architecture
Science Notebook Electrons In Atoms
Electron consists of three main pillars:
- Chromium for displaying web content.
- Node.js for working with the local filesystem and the operating system.
- Custom APIs for working with often-needed OS native functions.
Developing an application with Electron is like building a Node.js app with a web interface or building web pages with seamless Node.js integration.
Main and Renderer Processes
As it was mentioned before, Electron has two types of processes: Main and Renderer.
- The Main process creates web pages by creating
BrowserWindow
instances. EachBrowserWindow
instance runs the web page in its Renderer process. When aBrowserWindow
instance is destroyed, the corresponding Renderer process gets terminated as well. - The Main process manages all web pages and their corresponding Renderer processes.
- The Renderer process manages only the corresponding web page. A crash in one Renderer process does not affect other Renderer processes.
- The Renderer process communicates with the Main process via IPC to perform GUI operations in a web page. Calling native GUI-related APIs from the Renderer process directly is restricted due to security concerns and potential resource leakage.
The communication between processes is possible via Inter-Process Communication (IPC) modules: ipcMain
and ipcRenderer
.
APIs
Electron API
Electron APIs are assigned based on the process type, meaning that some modules can be used from either the Main or Renderer process, and some from both. Electron's API documentation indicates which process each module can be used from.
For example, to access the Electron API in both processes, require its included module:
To create a window, call the BrowserWindow
class, which is only available in the Main process:
To call the Main process from the Renderer, use the IPC module:
NOTE: Because Renderer processes may run untrusted code (especially from third parties), it is important to carefully validate the requests that come to the Main process.
Node.js API
NOTE: To access the Node.js API from the Renderer process, you need to set the nodeIntegration
preference to true
and the contextIsolation
preference to false
. Please note that access to the Node.js API in any renderer that loads remote content is not recommended for security reasons.
Electron exposes full access to Node.js API and its modules both in the Main and the Renderer processes. For example, you can read all the files from the root directory:
To use a Node.js module, you first need to install it as a dependency:
Then, in your Electron application, require the module: