Experimental
We like to say Electron-Hero is an "experiment in efficiency". Everyone knows that Electron can be a bit of a resource hog. Thinking about it, if you have 10 electron based apps, there are probably many common elements between them all, but they are duplicated between each of the 10 apps.
What If...
there was a way to have an Electron "run-time engine" that could download and run other electron "apps" without having to download and run all the resources needed for each "app" redundantly. It would save resources by leveraging common node modules across each app.
This is it
Electron-Hero is the response to that thought. It's a runtime engine that can download Electron source code and run it on the fly. The Electron-Hero runtime will have the most popular node modules pre-installed. Then each Electron-Hero app would only need to install the node modules not included.
Start your engine
If Electron-Hero is the engine, then the next question is what can it run? To answer that question, we built some Electron-Hero "apps". The first one is a very simple app that is just a two paned window with the ability to host other UI elements. But it did prove it was possible to download code on the fly and run it within an existing electron "instance".
To-Do Hero
These days seems like to-do lists are a big deal. Well, we put it on our list to make an Electron-Hero todo list and we did it in under 2 days. So, with this app you can locally store as many lists as you need to get things done. This used the same UI as in the starter app, but takes it to the next level with file access, and more robust UI styling.
Atom Hero
With Atom-Hero, we have a working duplicate of one of our favorite text editors, which is also built on Electron. Using Code-Mirror, we were able to come up with a functional text editor in just a few days. We didn't really find a tree-view that we liked, so we were able to include that in those few days. And we made it in a way that makes it easy to build into other Electron-Hero Apps.
