I created devRantron in Electron instead of JavaFX or QT

If we didn't we wouldn't even be 50% done by now ;)

Electron isn't that bad or is it?

@jAsE well I really don't think so :)
It's okay if works properly and helps us manage codebases easily and saves alot of time.
After all, everybody has a job and we are doing it for open source, so we've got to save some time or something right?

I use many electron based application like webtorrent, atom, vs code, slack and many more and they works fine.

@jAsE Sooo what if we all sit together, take the devRant API and make a native app on our own?

@jAsE OK, now I'm hyped, challenge accepted. I'll make a native Android app and post my results as soon as I have some.

@Forside Make a collab

@githelp Will do so as soon as I have a basic prototype on github.

@jAsE it may be faster to make it pretty but it's SUPER hard to make it have your own style. When developing Android it's really hard not to make it look like material design (which I dislike)

@Dacexi True. I also have pretty much no idea how to make custom views.

@jAsE also, swipaple tabs and ripple is really easy to do in web

@jAsE what makes you think we have time to create native apps for 3 different platforms? And what exactly would I gain from using native for devrantron?

The whole point of devrantron was to build a cross platform application.

@jAsE alright,

@dfox how to make swipaple tabs:
Install hammerjs
listen on swipe left and right
Keep an int or something "current tab"
As long as it's not the first or last pane:
Load in the pane but it's transformX(100%) then animate it in.

This is a 3 hour job at most to make devRant so much better.

@Dacexi we use Titanium and have to use their API. You can’t just use any JacaScript module.

On that note, Titanium is in fact open source so if you’re able to create a Titanium module we can use, I’m more than happy to integrate it.

@Dacexi It's not simply a web app but uses the Appcelerator framework. Don't know if you can just throw in some js framework there.

@dfox @Forside ah alright, I thought Titanium was more like Cordova than react native :)

@jAsE I just started some Android Native development for fun, so far its much easier than I expected.

I think the major use case for both Electron and mobile web/hybrid frameworks is portability. Take Slack for example, they would need teams for Web, Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS, 6 separate teams — currently they just need to hire a large pool of JS devs. It leads to a resource hungry chat program, but functionality is pretty unified across platforms.

It's funny how Javascript actually turned out to be Java's (write once, run anywhere) little brother after all.

And what is Native anyway? I've heard the same arguments against GTK, QT and JavaFX, they're abstraction layers between the application and the OS, which add bloat.

Electron does add a bit too much bloat in my opinion though.

Actually, fuck all of this, I want an ncurses devRant client.

@Jop- I run devRantron, Slack, Gitter, WhatsApp, Spotify and VSCode all the time in my laptop.

And also Chrome (I ditched Edge recently).

Edit: My laptop has 8GB ram.

@tahnik @Jop- all programs I use now except firefox are JS.

Slack, devRantron, signal, ramme (Instagram), Spotify, discord, emojex, gitter, vs code

I only use ~7-9gb of ram an I never close anything.

@Jop- not really, it would maybe be like a gig lower concidering the functionality of all these apps. 7 gigs is what I concider reasonable for 6 heavy apps running at the same time.

@Jop- I do understand your concern and I also think Electron apps should use shared runtime.

What I was trying to say that those apps never interfered with my other apps. Modern OSs re really clever with memory allocation. And considering most of the laptops, PCs now uses SSD, memory swapping is never noticeable.

But again, I am also looking forward to a solution for the shared runtime.

Interesting, looks like it's gonna be implemented soon for linux packages: https://github.com/electron-userlan...

The security aspect of electron apps are the real issues, because electron apps will always be some versions behind chromium and node. So any vulnerability that is published can be exploited in even the latest version of electron. Or am I wrong?

@feluelle @jAsE well, if there's a huge security vulnerability then there's one in Chrome too right?

I don't see how you're affected anyway in electron because how are "hackers" supposed to get their code on your electron instance?

It would make much more sense for them to Target the actual browser since it would be able to reach so many more users and would be much easier to do.

@Dacexi The latest version of electron 1.7.9 uses node 7.9.x (latest stable node is 8.9.x) and chromium 58.x (latest is 62.x).

So issues that have been fixed in the latest versions of node and chromium are not fixed in the electron app. Some security vulnerabilities might have been fixed but properly not all of them.

@feluelle if there is a serious vulnerability you can bet your ass it will be patched. It's one of the biggest open source projects on GitHub.

Please don't tell me you were considering JavaFX as an option. Nothing is more uglier, unfriendly with code and disgusting than JavaFX in my opinion. Specially to build modern looking apps.

@px06 we did choose JavaFX at first and we found it really hard to optimize. Then we moved to Electron.

@Jop- does javafx support flex and grid? That's an essentially now days in my design.

Let's do it in react native.