[desktop] Start a new boilerplate electronJS app w/ 9.0 release

[btopro]

https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-9-0 E 9.0 just came out; we are way out of date w/ version of this and so let's look for a new boilerplate; start a fresh branch and just blow everything we used to do away. This is very dated but let's keep in the same repo in the event we have conventions we want to move forward (minimal I'm sure) https://github.com/elmsln/hax-desktop-app so let's leave it alone.

All new work should take place in https://github.com/elmsln/HAXdesktop to match our naming convention for projects

261 will help w/ collaborating on the tooling itself and the end points for things across projects desiring this

215 will be achievable once we know what the structure for integration even looks like

@heyMP has built some interesting "hax11ty" commands which could probably have the 11ty parts abstracted a bit so that we have just like a haxserve command or some such thing

Actions

• [x] make a boilerplate in https://github.com/elmsln/HAXdesktop
• [x] to start, try and get it to just correctly load a hello-world page
• [x] test a build flow w/ github for distribution as outlined here
  • https://www.electronforge.io/config/publishers
  • https://www.electronforge.io/config/publishers/github
• [x] test out https://github.com/ArekSredzki/electron-release-server which has a docker instance so testing should be quick. See if this is potentially a viable way of distributing / managing updates over the life cycle

[btopro]

@dtn9197 I accepted the PR. Nice to see electron boilerplate is cleaner than it was previously. Next up working through the build / packaging routine. We want to make this work nicely with Linux, Windows, and OSX based routines and come up with a workflow for easily building new ones. @RCS-167 might be aware of a way that we could leverage automation like Tavis or Github hooks in order to run a routine that automatically generates new compiles of the app for different platforms (but I'm not positive).

[dtn9197]

@btopro do you think webpack tool is important for this project. Electron-builder, which is a popular tool for packaging and building distribution, actually recommends the webpack boiler plate setup in the documentation. Ideally i'd like to install only things that i understand. If it's important i'll do quick research on it so i can integrate the necessary toolings.

[btopro]

our team is 100% against webpack in all scenarios except where we are forced to engage with it. Please do not use this. See if there's a way to do the building without that bc it'll only cause issues.

[btopro]

@dtn9197 nice find on electronforge; never heard of that. Their docs section talks about github / multi-platform building being possible. I see "darwin" in your configuration which is a code name for a OSX version. See if you can get it working w/ a github workflow for distribution w/ an update routine: from their docs - https://www.electronforge.io/config/publishers/github

The GitHub target publishes all your artifacts to GitHub releases, this allows you your users to download the files straight from your repository or if your repository is open source you can use update.electronjs.org and get a free hosted update service.

https://www.electronforge.io/config/publishers claims you can use this capability to host and get "update" notifications so we could push updates out to people for self-updating apps.