What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?
Node Webkit has a forked version of Chromium Source with modifications (removed the event handler and replace with NodeJS one and a bunch of others). Seen at https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src
That is the major difference, in regards to architecture. Basically in Atom you need to create the Window, and in NodeWebkit you always have a Window and you need to do stuff to that Window.
The other ones include things like backers, NodeWebkit is backed mostly by Intel, as one of their developers is who is building it. Atom is backed by Github bunch of others.
Comments
What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?
Both are Chromium.
Node Webkit has a forked version of Chromium Source with modifications (removed the event handler and replace with NodeJS one and a bunch of others). Seen at https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src
Electron uses the Content framework and has no modifications to Chromium. Directly calling the required parts from the source (example https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/ch...).
That is the major difference, in regards to architecture. Basically in Atom you need to create the Window, and in NodeWebkit you always have a Window and you need to do stuff to that Window.
The other ones include things like backers, NodeWebkit is backed mostly by Intel, as one of their developers is who is building it. Atom is backed by Github bunch of others.
There's a wiki entry for that :
https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/developmen...
Here's a Stack Overflow answer to that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-e...