Photon – Framework for Electron apps • Hacker News Board

Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#1

Post by K-Wall » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:42 PM UTC

Photon – Framework for Electron apps
photonkit.com

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#2

Post by cbuq » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:30 PM UTC

I believe these frameworks are very cool and web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future.

My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world.

Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#3

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

This seems like a great start. Hopefully they'll get good looking Windows and Linux themes together as well.

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#4

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

cbuq wrote: post #2

I believe these frameworks are very cool and web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future. My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world. Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?

All of the technologies here, including Photon, are open sourced under commercial-friendly open source licenses (the MIT license being most common in this space.)

Electron is a "competitor" to NW.js (previously known as NodeWebkit). It was developed by Github for their commercial and non-commercial applications.

There should be no concerns about using these things in commercial projects. But you don't have to take my word for it, all of these projects have open source repositories, most of them on GitHub, and you can check their LICENSE files for yourself.

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#5

Post by baghira » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:47 PM UTC

This doesn't sound as a good name given the existence of: https://vmware.github.io/photon/ Granted, in the context of atom and electron it makes sense, but still.

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#6

Post by mcao » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:54 PM UTC

I guess I don't understand what makes this Electron specific. It looks like a UI kit similar to Bootstrap and others. Maybe it's too early in the project, but some mention of how the Node portions of Electron are used would be helpful.

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#7

Post by boromi » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

So is this just some sort of UI elements for electron? I don't understand what it offers that's new?

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#8

Post by lultimouomo » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

baghira wrote: post #5

This doesn't sound as a good name given the existence of: https://vmware.github.io/photon/ Granted, in the context of atom and electron it makes sense, but still.

Also an unfortunate name clash with the Photon and Electron embedded boards by Particle...

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#9

Post by baghira » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

lultimouomo wrote: post #8

baghira wrote: post #5

This doesn't sound as a good name given the existence of: https://vmware.github.io/photon/ Granted, in the context of atom and electron it makes sense, but still.

Also an unfortunate name clash with the Photon and Electron embedded boards by Particle...

At this rate I also foresee a clash with Phonon and Plasma from the KDE project.

Re: Photon – Framework for Electron apps

#10

Post by 0942v8653 » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:11 PM UTC

cbuq wrote: post #2

I believe these frameworks are very cool and web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future. My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world. Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?

> web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future

Can you expand on this? I'm interested in your viewpoint because the general consensus on HN seems to be that webapps are better off as webapps and desktop apps are better off as desktop apps—being in the browser seems to be good enough for most webapps, and when packaging something as a desktop app there are little quirks that mess it up.