What is this thing you call Restorizor?
Restorizor is a desktop application built using Node.js and React inside of the Electron framework.
Years ago I wrote a PHP and Perl service that restored websites from web.archive.org. I had a WordPress site that accepted orders on a website to restore websites. When a new order was received I called a Perl script that did all of the downloading and rebuilding of the website. Over the years the majority of my coding has shifted to using javascript and Node.js. To improve my node-fu I thought porting my old Perl based restore script over to Node.js would be a nice project to tackle. The end result of this became the Wayback Restore JS library I made available on NPM.
Anyone who uses javascript is probably aware of the countless number of frameworks and libraries that are available to us. It is a great time to be a javascript developer but at the same time you can end up in analysis paralysis trying to decide on the next thing to use. The next logical progression for me was to create an Electron application that could restore websites using the NPM library I wrote.
Electron is an open-source software framework developed and maintained by GitHub. It allows for the development of desktop GUI applications using web technologies: it combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. The beauty of all of this was I could easily create an application using a programming language I was familiar with and have something that could execute on Windows, macOs, and Linux.
What’s next?
My list of possible features to add to this application are almost endless. Depending on how popular and useful people find this application will determine how far I decide to go with this.
Stay tuned!