Over the course of the GSoC program, I implemented an API history feature for the
Electron documentation and its functions, classes, etc. in a similar fashion to the
Node.js documentation: by allowing the
use of a simple but powerful YAML schema in the API documentation Markdown files
and displaying it nicely on the Electron documentation website.
2020 年，我们推出了我们在 Discord server 的社区。 我们之前在 Atom 的论坛上有一个版块，但决定有一个更非正式的消息传递平台，让维护者和 Electron 开发人员之间有一个讨论的空间，并获得一般的调试帮助。
2021 年，我们在 @BlackHole1 的帮助下建立了 Electron China 用户群。 这个群体在中国蓬勃发展的科技界中对 Electron 用户的增长起了重要作用，为他们在我们的英语语言的范畴之外提供了一个创意合作、讨论 Electron 的空间。 我们还要感谢 cnpm 为支持 Electron 在他们的中文镜像中为 npm 所做的工作。
在 2020 年，我们参加了首次举行的 Google Season of Docs 活动，与 @bandantonio 合作重新设计了 Electron 的新用户教程流程。
2022年，我们第一次指导 Google Summer of Code 的学生。 @aryanshridhar did some awesome work to refactor Electron Fiddle's core version loading logic and migrate its bundler to webpack.
Electron 的核心代码库是一个庞大的 C++ 代码库，而编译时间一直是限制我们能够快速发布错误修复和新功能的因素之一。 在2020年，我们部署了Not Goma，这是一个专门为 Electron 定制的后端，用于 Google 的 Goma 分布式编译器服务。 Not Goma 处理来自授权用户机器的编译请求，并在后端的数百个核心上进行分布式编译。 它还会缓存编译结果，这样编译相同文件的其他人只需下载预编译的结果即可。
自从启用 Not Goma 以来，维护者的编译时间已经从几个小时缩短到几分钟的级别。 拥有稳定的互联网连接成为贡献者编译 Electron 的最低要求！
In its early days as the backbone of the Atom text editor, community discussion on the Electron framework occurred in a single channel in Atom’s Slack workspace. As time passed and the two projects were increasingly decoupled, the relevance of the Atom workspace to the Electron project decreased, and maintainer participation in the Slack channel declined in the same manner.
Up until now, we had still been redirecting our broader community to the Atom Slack workspace, even though we’ve had many reports from folks who have had trouble receiving invitations, and few of our core maintainers were frequenting the channel.
We’re setting up this shiny new server to be a central discussion hub for the community where you can get the latest news on all things Electron.
So far, the server’s membership consists of a few maintainers who have been working together to set it up, but we’re so excited to chat with you all! Come ask for help, keep up to date with Electron releases, or just hang out with other developers. We’ve got a handy invite for you that’ll give you access to the server!
Hacktoberfest 2020
作为一个大型和长期运行的开源项目，Electron如果没有其社区的所有 贡献就不会像现在这样成功。 从提交代码到错误报告到文档更改，还有更多。 That’s why we believe in the importance of participating in Hacktoberfest to usher in a wider community of developers of all skill levels into the project.
This year, we don’t have a wider project to give you all to work on, but we’d like to focus on opportunities to contribute across the Electron JavaScript ecosystem.
P.S. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, we also have a backlog of issues marked with help wanted tags if you're looking for more of a challenge.
Moreover, it’s also no coincidence that the grand opening of our Discord server coincides with the largest celebration of open-source software of the year. Check out the #hacktoberfest channel to ask for help on your Hacktoberfest PR. In case you missed it, here's the invite link again!
Electron is proud to be participating in the second edition of Google's Season of Docs initiative, which pairs mentors from open source organizations with technical writers to improve project documentation.
When people use GitHub in their job or OSS activities, they tend to receive many notifications on a daily basis. As a way to subscribe to the notifications, GitHub provides email and web notifications. I used these for a couple of years, but I faced the following problems:
It's easy to overlook issues where I was mentioned, I commented, or I am watching.
I put some issues in a corner of my head to check later, but I sometimes forget about them.
To not forget issues, I keep many tabs open in my browser.
It's hard to check all issues that are related to me.
It's hard to grasp all of my team's activity.
I was spending a lot of time and energy trying to prevent those problems, so I decided to make an issue reader for GitHub to solve these problems efficiently, and started developing Jasper.
Jasper is used by developers, designers, and managers in several companies that are using GitHub. Of course, some OSS developers also are using it. And it is also used by some people at GitHub!
Once Jasper is configured, the following screen appears. From left to right, you can see "streams list", "issues list" and "issue body".
This "stream" is the core feature of Jasper. For example, if you want to see "issues that are assigned to @zeke in the electron/electron repository", you create the following stream:
repo:electron/electron assignee:zeke is:issue
After creating the stream and waiting for a few seconds, you can see the issues that meet the conditions.
Issues that are requested review by cat. But these are not reviewed yet.
is:pr reviewed-by:cat
Issues that are reviewed by cat
As you may have noticed by looking at these, streams can use GitHub's search queries. For details on how to use streams and search queries, see the following URLs.
Jasper also has features for unread issue management, unread comment management, marking stars, notification updating, filtering issues, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
Apps can be built for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
Electron is actively developed and has a large community.
These features enable rapid and simple desktop application development. It is awesome! If you have any product idea, you should consider using Electron by all means.
What are some challenges you've faced while developing Jasper?
I had a hard time figuring out the "stream" concept. 首先，我考虑使用 GitHub 的 通知 API。 However I noticed that it does not support certain use cases. 此后，除了通知API外，我考虑使用 问题 API 和 合并请求 API。 But it never became what I wanted. 然后在思考各种方法时 ，我认识到轮询GitHub的 搜索 API 将提供最大的灵活性。 It took about a month of experimentation to get to this point, then I implemented a prototype of Jasper with the stream concept in two days.
Note: The polling is limited to once every 10 seconds at most. This is acceptable enough for the restriction of GitHub API.
This week we caught up with @feross and @dcposch to talk about WebTorrent, the web-powered torrent client that connects users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network.
WebTorrent is the first torrent client that works in the browser. It's written completely in JavaScript and it can use WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required.
Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.
You can see a demo of WebTorrent in action here: webtorrent.io.
Imagine a video site like YouTube, but where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes.
Browser-to-browser communication cuts out the middle-man and lets people communicate on their own terms. No more client/server – just a network of peers, all equal. WebTorrent is the first step in the journey to re-decentralize the Web.
About one year ago, we decided to build WebTorrent Desktop, a version of WebTorrent that runs as a desktop app.
We created WebTorrent Desktop for three reasons:
We wanted a clean, lightweight, ad-free, open source torrent app
We wanted a torrent app with good streaming support
We need a "hybrid client" that connects the BitTorrent and WebTorrent networks
If we can already download torrents in my web browser, why a desktop app?
First, a bit of background on the design of WebTorrent.
In the early days, BitTorrent used TCP as its transport protocol. Later, uTP came along promising better performance and additional advantages over TCP. Every mainstream torrent client eventually adopted uTP, and today you can use BitTorrent over either protocol. The WebRTC protocol is the next logical step. It brings the promise of interoperability with web browsers – one giant P2P network made up of all desktop BitTorrent clients and millions of web browsers.
“Web peers” (torrent peers that run in a web browser) make the BitTorrent network stronger by adding millions of new peers, and spreading BitTorrent to dozens of new use cases. WebTorrent follows the BitTorrent spec as closely as possible, to make it easy for existing BitTorrent clients to add support for WebTorrent.
Some torrent apps like Vuze already support web peers, but we didn't want to wait around for the rest to add support. So basically, WebTorrent Desktop was our way to speed up the adoption of the WebTorrent protocol. By making an awesome torrent app that people really want to use, we increase the number of peers in the network that can share torrents with web peers (i.e. users on websites).
What are some interesting use cases for torrents beyond what people already know they can do?
One of the most exciting uses for WebTorrent is peer-assisted delivery. Non-profit projects like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive could reduce bandwidth and hosting costs by letting visitors chip in. Popular content can be served browser-to-browser, quickly and cheaply. Rarely-accessed content can be served reliably over HTTP from the origin server.
The Internet Archive actually already updated their torrent files so they work great with WebTorrent. So if you want to embed Internet Archive content on your site, you can do it in a way that reduces hosting costs for the Archive, allowing them to devote more money to actually archiving the web!
There are also exciting business use cases, from CDNs to app delivery over P2P.
What are some of your favorite projects that use WebTorrent?
The coolest thing built with WebTorrent, hands down, is probably Gaia 3D Star Map. It's a slick 3D interactive simulation of the Milky Way. The data loads from a torrent, right in your browser. It's awe-inspiring to fly through our star system and realize just how little we humans are compared to the vastness of our universe.
You can read about how this was made in Torrenting The Galaxy, a blog post where the author, Charlie Hoey, explains how he built the star map with WebGL and WebTorrent.
We're also huge fans of Brave. Brave is a browser that automatically blocks ads and trackers to make the web faster and safer. Brave recently added torrent support, so you can view traditional torrents without using a separate app. That feature is powered by WebTorrent.
So, just like how most browsers can render PDF files, Brave can render magnet links and torrent files. They're just another type of content that the browser natively supports.
One of the co-founders of Brave is actually Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, the language we wrote WebTorrent in, so we think it's pretty cool that Brave chose to integrate WebTorrent.
Why did you choose to build WebTorrent Desktop on Electron?
However, in the case of WebTorrent Desktop, we use nearly every Electron feature, and many dozens of Chrome features in the course of normal operation. If we wanted to implement these features from scratch for each platform, it would have taken months or years longer to build our app, or we would have only been able to release for a single platform.
Just to get an idea, we use Electron's dock integration (to show download progress), menu bar integration (to run in the background), protocol handler registration (to open magnet links), power save blocker (to prevent sleep during video playback), and automatic updater. As for Chrome features, we use plenty: the <video> tag (to play many different video formats), the <track> tag (for closed captions support), drag-and-drop support, and WebRTC (which is non-trivial to use in a native app).
Not to mention: our torrent engine is written in JavaScript and assumes the existence of lots of Node APIs, but especially require('net') and require('dgram') for TCP and UDP socket support.
Basically, Electron is just what we needed and had the exact set of features we needed to ship a solid, polished app in record time.
The WebTorrent library has been in development as an open source side project for two years. We made WebTorrent Desktop in four weeks. Electron is the primary reason that we were able to build and ship our app so quickly.
Just as Node.js made server programming accessible to a generation of jQuery-using front-end programmers, Electron makes native app development accessible to anyone familiar with Web or Node.js development. Electron is extremely empowering.
Do the website and the Desktop client share code?
Yes, the webtorrent npm package works in Node.js, in the browser, and in Electron. The exact same code can run in all environments – this is the beauty of JavaScript. It's today's universal runtime. Java Applets promised "Write Once, Run Anywhere" apps, but that vision never really materialized for a number of reasons. Electron, more than any other platform, actually gets pretty darn close to that ideal.
What are some challenges you've faced while building WebTorrent?
In early versions of the app, we struggled to make the UI performant. We put the torrent engine in the same renderer process that draws the main app window which, predictably, led to slowness anytime there was intense CPU activity from the torrent engine (like verifying the torrent pieces received from peers).
We fixed this by moving the torrent engine to a second, invisible renderer process that we communicate with over IPC. This way, if that process briefly uses a lot of CPU, the UI thread will be unaffected. Buttery-smooth scrolling and animations are so satisfying.
Note: we had to put the torrent engine in a renderer process, instead of a "main" process, because we need access to WebRTC (which is only available in the renderer.)
One thing we'd love to see is better documentation about how to build and ship production-ready apps, especially around tricky subjects like code signing and auto-updating. We had to learn about best practices by digging into source code and asking around on Twitter!
Is WebTorrent Desktop done? If not, what's coming next?
We think the current version of WebTorrent Desktop is excellent, but there's always room for improvement. We're currently working on improving polish, performance, subtitle support, and video codec support.
If you're interested in getting involved in the project, check out our GitHub page!
Any Electron development tips that might be useful to other developers?
Feross, one of the WebTorrent Desktop contributors, recently gave a talk "Real world Electron: Building Cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript" at NodeConf Argentina that contains useful tips for releasing a polished Electron app. 如果你处于一个基本的工作应用程序的阶段，并且你正在试图将它带到一个更高水平的打造和专业水平上，这个话尤其有用。
DC, another WebTorrent contributor, wrote a checklist of things you can do to make your app feel polished and native. It comes with code examples and covers things like macOS dock integration, drag-and-drop, desktop notifications, and making sure your app loads quickly.
