Cross-platform email client with React and CoffeeScript

https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02

by rpeden • 9 years ago

71 18 9 years ago

So, another electron app for Desktop? I've heard anecdotal comments on HN about how electron based apps frequently hog resources and such an overkill as a replacement for native apps. Anybody know of a dumb cross platform wrapper that does just enough HTML/JS for apps like this to work without the bloat?

sbarre2• 9 years ago

Does the "bloat" in Electron come from the wrapper or from the rendering engine?

zzalpha3• 9 years ago

If, by "rendering engine", you mean the full instance of Chromium being run to drive the app... the full instance of Chromium that nothing else on your machine shares... yeah, I guess you could say it's the rendering engine.

pspeter32• 9 years ago

No, in this case they are using PhoneGap for mobile. I also think that the electron hate is overhyped. If you really don't want the overhead, use the website instead. (eg Slack)

zzalpha3• 9 years ago

I also think that the electron hate is overhyped. If you really don't want the overhead, use the website instead. (eg Slack)

So... you think the Electron hate is "overhyped".

And then recommend people not use Electron apps if they are concerned about bloat.

This strikes me as a bit of a contradiction...

pcunite• 9 years ago

Desktop apps are built on top of Electron and mobile apps on top of PhoneGap.

jszymborski• 9 years ago

The Telegram client is a good example of how to do this right [0].

You can acheive this in python w/ pyQt/pySide as well... just include a QWebView and hook into the javascript [1].

Avoiding the whole server & network stack makes things run obviously lighter.

[0] https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6447011/pyqt-pyside-webk...

kodablah• 9 years ago

I believe QWebView w/ QtWebKit was deprecated in favor of QWebEngine which is Chromium thereby causing the same problems as Electron (bulky, multi-process which is the way of the browser these days). Granted QtWebKit appears to be maintained in a fork at [0].

If someone wanted to use Chrome, a more bare-bones approach w/ Qt might be CEF. An example in Python is here [1].

0 - https://github.com/annulen/webkit (see the wiki) 1 - https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython/blob/master/examples/...

plehoux• 9 years ago

Philippe here, one of Missive co-founders. Email client job is to render HTML emails, whatever tech you choose for the UI, you still end up rendering HTML. Electron makes sense.

gumboshoes• 9 years ago

So the headline is wrong, right? It's not just HTML. It's HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

cpburns2009• 9 years ago

With a massively bloated run-time for the desktop edition (i.e., Electron).

sctb• 9 years ago

Thanks, we've updated the submission title.

Steeeve• 9 years ago

You’d be surprised (I was!) at how much memory leak your JavaScript has if you don’t monitor it.

What are the most recommended ways to monitor for leaks in client-side javascript?

pspeter32• 9 years ago

You can log memory usage in some browsers but the memory usage is bucketed so you will not get a fine grained number. At Asana, we look at the 99th percentile and then use Chrome to take heap dumps.

z3t4• 9 years ago

Only use a framework if you know what you need!

Cross-platform email client with React and CoffeeScript

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