gnat
I’m completely new to Elixir and don’t know Ruby, either.
Is anyone writing GUI applications in Elixir? I don’t know the language and the easiest way for me to learn (not to mention the way I’d primarily be using any language right now) is for desktop applications with a GUI front end - ideally something that will work on both Mac and Linux. What are my choices and how well supported/ integrated are they? In case it matters, I’m specifically interested in writing a distributed business application connecting multiple machines over the internet. From that standpoint, Elixir seems like it might be a good fit. But I need to have a GUI interface and not just in a browser.
I tried to research this question first with a web search and then with a search on this site; I haven’t found any good answers so far.
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Snake-Sanders
I passed by the other day to check out what was new on this topic, I did a quick search and I found this awesome project:
Elixir Desktop
LostKobrakai
Did you manage to get something working with webview? Sounds like an interesting option compared to electron.
outlog
please do keep us posted, sounds awesome - dream scenario would be an app that you could build for desktop and/or for the nerves kiosk GitHub - nerves-web-kiosk/kiosk_system_rpi3: Nerves QtWebEngine Kiosk system for Raspberry Pi 3 · GitHub
Gee5ive
Kind of late to the party here, but for anyone still interested in this, I’m currently building a phoenix app that I plan to distribute on desktops using webview, seems to be the most simple and straightforward approach.
WildYorkies
I wonder if using ElixirScript and compiling to electron would be a possibility
WildYorkies
I agree. People are going crazy over component oriented architecture now. Isolating and orchestrating state is selling like hot cakes.
Elixir is designed for this, no? This kind of reactive design.
yawaramin
Here’s Joe Armstrong’s research on GUI options for Erlang: [erlang-questions] My quest for a decent way to make a GUI in erlang
mchean
So maybe just presenting the browser as a GUI interface would be the best solution?
bbense
There’s a kind of chicken and egg problem here. IMHO, the BEAM would be a pretty awesome GUI app environment, but it doesn’t have a robust interface to the client windowing API. There is the wx interface, but the problem with putting any GUI library in as a NIF is that it can crash the BEAM.
One way around this is to use the browser and javascript as your GUI interface.
Creating a Port interface to OpenGL is also pretty intriguing. However, I think for Native UI Desktop Apps, Elixir is going to be an uphill battle. There will likely be places where this battle is worthwhile, but I think for most applications the time to delivery penalty will be too great until more of the spadework in library interfaces is available.
What might make more sense is to drive an Elixir app via a GUI wrapper if your underlying problem maps well to what the BEAM does well. (i.e. if your basic problem is “embarrassingly parallel” and I/O limited ) What would scream “Elixir Desktop App” to me is a problem that using the increasing number of cores available on high end desktops would help.
While Elixir will never likely be the fastest on 1 or two cores, once you’ve solved your problem in Elixir it becomes much easier to throw 24 or (128) cores at it and see reasonable speed ups. Right now those kinds of machines are mostly servers, but that level of concurrency will eventually make it’s way into desktop computing.
mchean
I write mostly GUI business apps, and also need a lot of reporting. The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook states in the intro that Elixir that Elixir & GUI don’t mix, but several presentations at the Elixir Conf, including the Toyota Way seems to indicate that large companies have embraced Elixir for business apps. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
A corollary question is whether any of you are using reporting tools, and whether you are writing your ORM in Ecto, if I understand that correctly, or in stored procedures. It seems to me that in order for a reporting tool to interact with the data it would have to be outside of Ecto.