Weekend Loose Ends

My team and I have been working on building a small Electron app for the past five days or so. We started with MarkoJS and Lasso, but had to swap out Lasso for Webpack a few days in due to some known issues with requiring Electron remote and fs, which we couldn’t solve with Lasso. Our app idea was a distraction app that simply linked to some well chosen distraction websites. Among them, random TED Talks, GIFs and a beat maker. Because we may or may not have been the first people to try and build an Electron app with Marko (and Lasso to start), we spent the majority of our time on this project just figuring out the different ways we could structure our project’s main.js, renderer.js and Marko files. We played around with components and state, just like you would in React. State was a little harder to figure out how to pass around than we anticipated. We eventually gave up on using state as we couldn’t quite get it to work the way we wanted. In the end, our code base is very small, but we spent a lot of time trying things and deleting things and just having fun playing around with the Marko library.

Would I do the same thing again? Yes. This was also our very first ever Electron project. I do wish I had spent more time just learning the Electron environment in a library I was more familiar with. On the flip side, it doesn’t seem like basic Electron apps are very hard or time consuming to build, so I do believe I got a good experience in building an Electron app. I (and I’m assuming my partners) had a lot of fun figuring out Marko and chatting with the guys from eBay who built it. We struggled with our setting up our environment for two days. We had one bug left by the end of day three, which one of the creators was able to solve for us with one line of code added to our Webpack config file. I think that the best part of this project was the fact that we were working with something less known and used and it was really awesome getting to chat with the guys from Marko about our project and the issues we were having.

We’re now working on writing some basic tests for our app with Spectron and the chai-as-promised library.