1. Tooling required to create desktop apps

To create desktop apps as a web developer, you need to understand the main options available out there so that you don’t waste time on tools that can’t provide you with what you need. Here is the breakdown of the 3 best desktop javascript frameworks for building desktop apps to give you an idea of what’s out there:

Electron

This is the tool we’ll use since it’s the most popular and powerful. It has been around for years, used by lots of companies including slack, atom, discord, intuit and many others.

It has been created by the github team so it has a strong reputation and quality code behind it. You can rest assured this framework will continue growing and dominating more projects in the future.

They use the chrome engine underneath which means your app will run extremely fast regardless of the computer used.

With it you can build product fast and easily since it uses javascript, html and css which is excellent for the many web developers out there that want to expand their skillset by being able to develop for desktop platforms.

NW.JS

Another great product but with much less popularity. It allows you to build desktop apps using node.js. It was known as the node-webkit engine because it uses the same technology that browsers like chrome and safari use.

Proton Native

For those of you familiar with react and react native, proton native is an excellent choice because it uses the react framework while allowing you to use all the react.js libraries available out there.

It has even better performance than electron at specific tasks because they implement their own engine underneath so you can expect near-native performance.

Great for those familiar with react that want more control at the expense of longer development times.

Now that you know the best options out there for building desktop apps as a web developer, let’s start right away with Electron since it’s the best for beginners and for most use cases.