What you should know before starting node-webkit • Hacker News Board

Re: What you should know before starting node-webkit

#21

Post by JohnTHaller » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

kethinov wrote: post #18

JohnTHaller wrote: post #13

We used node-webkit with a portable launcher (to contain registry entries and keep settings with the app on Windows) to make 2048 Portable over at PortableApps.com: http://portableapps.com/apps/games/2048-portable It was a bit of an experiment to see how well it worked... and IF it worked. We compressed some of node-webkit with UPX to shrink it down without compressing all of it and sacrificing performance. It works…

Can you elaborate on compressing node-webkit with UPX? I've got a nw app which feels somewhat fat at ~70mb and shaving some of that down would be of interest to me.

Sure. Our release of 2048 Portable 2.1 has node-webkit 0.9.2 slimmed down from about 59MB to about 23MB. We'd originally tried packing it to maximum using brute since it's so large for the purpose but found that nrv2e worked best with everything. It's not surprising as we usually recommend that for most purposes. It's the best balance of size, speed, and decreased false positives in antivirus apps (LZMA seems to increase false positives).

You can use our PortableApps.com AppCompactor to compress all DLLs and EXEs in a directory and sub-directories with your choice of UPX levels easily without needing to use the command line on them all. As a bonus, it runs UPX with -t after each compression to test it and ensure it works properly. As always, you'll need to double check that it runs properly as some DLLs don't like being UPX compressed. But node-webkit seems to run quite happily. Grab AppCompactor here: http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/portableapps.com_appc...

We also experimented a bit with compression level of the .nw file but I can't recall exactly what compression level in 7-Zip we wound up settling on at the moment.

Re: What you should know before starting node-webkit

#22

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 8:23 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #3

mmahemoff wrote: post #2

I like node-webkit. One of the ironies about the "Write once, Run many" mantra for HTML5 is that it's mostly applied to phones, where the runtime presents numerous challenges. On the desktop, however, HTML5 runtimes are faster and more feature-rich, so this is really where the portable aspect of HTML5 can excel. Adding Node to the mix makes it powerful too, going beyond regular browser capabilities.

Conversely I've been a little unimpressed by some of the standout node-webkit applications. LightTable in particular just doesn't seem very smooth or easy to use when I actually sit down and use it.

Game Dev Tycoon uses node-webkit and I find it runs extremely well!

Re: What you should know before starting node-webkit

#23

Post by Igglyboo » Sat, Aug 02, 2014, 4:31 AM UTC

mkohlmyr wrote: post #14

Igglyboo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light Table and Atom both run on node and they're pretty slow/jerky for me. Slow enough where I'd rather use IntelliJ for general purpose editing, intellij has a decent startup time compared to those two but it's way faster after that. Plus I always have it open when I'm working anyway so another tab doesn't really make a difference.

I run LightTable and PyCharm both side by side throughout the day as of a almost a year ago and I definitely feel the opposite. LightTable is much more responsive for me. Although switching to an SSD made PyCharm a lot faster.

That may be the case honestly, I tried LightTable for a few weeks about a year ago and it was somewhat slow, it may well have gotten better.

I tried atom a week ago and it was extremely slow, much slower than LightTable. Almost 30s startup times and it was extremely slow at opening large files and even slower when trying to scroll through them.