Ubuntu Discuss: Re: Ubiquity NG - was Re: ubiquity migrated to git

Wednesday 9 May 2018

Re: Ubiquity NG - was Re: ubiquity migrated to git

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Third, we have Electron, which is the HTML5 app framework used by world  class app developers. Skype, Spotify and a ton of GREAT apps on Ubuntu  are Electron apps.

I respectfully disagree that this is the correct approach for a system  installer. With all due respect to these very popular applications,  Electron uses quite a bit of system resources and could be interesting  to get working correctly. If you are absolutely certain that this is the  way to go, I won't argue this point too much, but I believe that you  would have triple the speed (and/or it would use a third of the memory)  by writing a native application rather than an Electron one, and with  proper testing and organization (perhaps by using a compiled language  rather than an interpreted one, etc.), it would be a very welcome speed  jump over the current Ubiquity codebase.

As a potential alternative to Electron for cross platform webapps built on web technologies, it might be worth looking into webview (https://github.com/zserge/webview) as an alternative. From some of the things I've been seeing around the web it gives reasonable compatibility with Electron without adding the entire Chromium engine to each application; rather, it uses built in web rendering engines wherever possible.

Chris MacNaughton
chris.macnaughton@canonical.com