I am wondering what the main differences are between Electron and JXcore.
I was thinking about how I could make a NodeJS server into an app and I came across both of these. They seem to do the same thing, except that JXcore supports mobile and Electron doesn't.
If Electron doesn't support mobile then how was the slack mobile app created?
Thanks in advance!
From the JXCore site(http://jxcore.com/tech/):
JXcore is a fork on the open source Node.js project
It uses LLVM to compile javascript as opposed to V8 which NodeJS does.
In terms of what are the main differences- Electron is a framework for building native, cross platform desktop applications, where it appears JXCore is a javascript engine forked from NodeJS.
Electron is built with NodeJS, and Chromium. So to make it fair, the comparison would be better stated "How does Electron work with NodeJS vs JXcore". Since I don't have any experience with JXCore, I can't answer that question. I would venture to say the only way to know that is to fork electron and replace Node with JXCore.
Based on your background, I would assume you are thinking about making one application that works cross platform across mobile and desktop environments. To that, I would say it is possible, but you are going to have 2 different projects. There are things in Electron that you wouldn't want included in your mobile app, since they are working with completely different operating systems. You are right that electron does not support mobile (it wasn't built for that).
As far as your side question goes, there are any number of technologies that slack could have used to create their mobile app. They could have used Java , Swift, Objective-C, .NET, Ruby, or Javascript.
There are cross platform tools such as RubyMotion, NativeScript, React Native, and Xamarin that could also be used to create native mobile apps, that all compile down into the native language the mobile OS understands.
A final approach could be the use of tools such as Cordova/Phonegap which create mobile apps via a "web view". Essentially, this is like creating an app that launches a web browser to interact with your phone.
If you are looking for an example on how to build once and use everywhere, I would look at the github repo found here https://github.com/NathanWalker/angular-seed-advanced. This shows a common codebase that can be used in Electron, Web, and Mobile.