Revery looks interesting, specially due to the use of ReasonML, which looks like an OK functional deviation of JavaScript.
However, right now I am not really sure I have the time to learn yet another technology, never mind remaking the entire project from scratch.
CEF looks interesting, but I am afraid my lack of experience with CEF as well as how to link erlang binaries with something else binaries is a decisive factor to not use this solution.
Did you seen this one in your research:
https://github.com/crqra/webview
It’s the Elixir bindings for:
https://github.com/webview/webview
Maybe @Gee5ive can tell more to us about his experience:
And you also have this research from Joe:
Webview for elixir, unfortunately is not being maintained, nor is it active.
It never left alpha and its development stop 2 years ago.
Looked promising though.
As for the post from Joe, I couldn’t take much, as most of the links from there are no longer active (they are broken) and the few links that aren’t are for C and Red and REBOL, languages I do not plan on integrating in the project.
Thanks for the research though!
It’s essentially Ocaml, which should feel quite similar to Elixir.
Why not have a study of the Wings 3D codebase and try it out yourself? It has the installer code in it too. I think Fred Herbert made a project in wx not too long ago too which would be worth a look too.
You could try tauri which targets rust, or sciter-js. Both allows for you to connect to your phoenix server.
I’m not too sure if the self-healing properties of the beam are as beneficial for gui apps, which users can just force kill and restart in seconds. It might even be detrimental to user experience, especially if the app gets stuck in an infinite loop of restarting without the user being able to manually handle the error.
onivim autocompletes every do as defmodule or another word, you have to go back to normal mode each time. Awful. I’d say it is not ready for elixir right now 
But the autocomplete and docs for all the standard library and own modules works well!
Is using the users default web browser out of the question?
You could use something like Bakeware and then use System.cmd("open http://localhost:<my-port>") to open the default browser on the users machine. The command would differ between OSs, but should be pretty easy to implement.
You should probably also consider a method to figure out an unused port, and include that in your command to launch the browser.
I don’t mind using the default browser, it’s just I don’t know how to make an Elixir program open a new browser window (using the default browser) and then making it open the url I have in mind.
Bakeware looked promising, but it doesn’t work for Windows, which is a requirement.
I did find this code snippet:
def open(url) do
start_browser_command =
case :os.type do
{:win32, _} ->
"start"
{:unix, :darwin} ->
"open"
{:unix, _} ->
"xdg-open"
end
if System.find_executable(start_browser_command) do
System.cmd(start_browser_command, [url])
else
Mix.raise "Command not found: #{start_browser_command}"
end
end
From the project:
https://github.com/wojtekmach/iex_help_open/blob/master/lib/iex_help_open.ex
Could prove useful, as long as I can make it work for both Windows and Linux.