Multi-Tenant Electron Host

Multi-tenant Electron host is the facility used to combine several tenant applications in a single Electron host application. It solves the problem of the waste of resources created when the application is packaged. The tenant applications contribute some 0.1-0.2% of the resources, sharing the rest. The applications provide mostly or exclusively only the renderer part, using the electron resources via the contextBridge. Even some renderer resources are also shared, such as component libraries and a common definition set.

A tenant application has dual usage, as a separate Electron application or as a part of the Multi-tenant Electron host. One can develop, debug, and execute applications as standalone applications under Electron. In a packaged form, they work as parts of a single host application, selected by a command-line argument. Several instances of the same or different applications can run in parallel.

The solution features cross-platform packaging and multi-process debugging and refined UI conceptions: culture-independent menus with the unified subscription based on command sets, hot keys, replacement for HTML access keys, hints used as the replacement for HTML titles.

Presently, there are three tenant applications:

• Conceptual Electron Editor is a proof-of-concept text editor that showcases interesting techniques related to Electron, Node.js, and Web technologies. It includes a plugin architecture, macros, refined search and replace conceptions.

• Personal Database is a single-file database featuring dynamic schemas.

• Storage-Free Pass is a password generator that combines master passwords with non-secret account information (seed) to create strong passwords. Passwords are not stored anywhere; they are generated every time they are used.

Command Line

Editor API Documentation

Installation (Optional)

Before running Editor, installation of Acorn is recommended.

In the root directory of the Multi-Tenant Electron Host, issue the command:

npm install

Alternatively, execute build/install-dependencies.cmd on Windows or build/install-dependencies.sh on other OS.

Acorn provides additional information on the JavaScript syntax errors (line and column) for some Editor plugins, notably Calculator. If Acorn is not installed, the behavior falls back to showing only the error message.

Packaging

• Execute build/install-dependencies.cmd on Windows or build/install-dependencies.sh on other OS.
• Execute one or more build/package-* scripts, depending on the target platform and CPU architecture.
• Execute the application mt-host in the directory created by the packaging script. See the command-line documentation for more information.