In this chapter, we walked through a brief history of Electron and learned how to configure a development environment on popular platforms such as macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. You also looked at the various configuration options you can implement for your Electron applications so that you can build, distribute, and run them on the corresponding platforms.

As you can see, not just the applications that are built with the Electron framework are cross-platform—the development process is nearly identical too, thanks to Node.js and NPM. You can work on a single platform and even build distribution packages for other platforms, though you usually need to have access to real or virtual machines to run and test apps.

In the next chapter, we are going to focus on application development and our first project implementation. We are going to build a markdown editor project so that you can understand how a web application can be integrated with the desktop shell.