The Holy Grail of Isomorphism: Packaging Elixir for Desktop Apps

Transcript

1. The Holy Grail of Isomorphism:
   Packaging Elixir for Desktop Apps
   Evadne Wu
   Elixir Enthusiast
   ev@radi.ws
   twitter.com/evadne
   

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2. Myself
   Aspiring Bodgemaster
   Elixir Programmer (etso, packmatic, shun, etc.)
   Cocoa/Touch Programmer (DayFlow, LiveFrost, etc.)
   Inquiries: ev@radi.ws
   Arguments: twitter.com/evadne
   

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3. 1
   The Problem
   

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5. The number of
   technologies we have
   to learn is too damn
   high.
   

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7. 2
   The Environment
   

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11. 3
    The Accident
    

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17. y
    

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22. 4
    The Stuffing
    

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23. Electron (Simplified)
    Chrome
    Mac App
    Node.js
    Server
    

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24. How about this?
    Web View
    Mac App
    Erlang
    Server
    

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25. Prior Art: Nerves
    WebEngine Kiosk
    https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/webengine_kiosk
    

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27. Prior Art: iErl
    

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28. Prior Art: iErl
    iErl
    https://github.com/couchbase/iErl
    An embeddable, statically-linked BEAM
    No NIFs
    No JIT
    

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29. Optimisations & Tradeoffs
    Non-Native, Web-Based UI, but normalised after a
    decade of Web 2.0 development
    Non-Standard Tooling, but with a much smaller
    conceptual space and customisability
    Non-Specialised BEAM VM, but with rock-solid,
    predictable performance and stability
    

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30. Today’s Approach
    Create an Elixir Project with Phoenix, in the normal way, with
    some Endpoint customisation for port-finding and self-
    termination
    Create an Xcode Project for macOS, with a WKWebView and a
    Task that starts the Server
    Create an Elixir Release and have Xcode copy it into the
    Application Bundle
    

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31. Miscellaneous
    Storing data locally: Either use sqlite3 / sqlitex from
    Elixir side or use Local Storage from JavaScript side.
    Synchronising with the server: Use whatever existing
    APIs you have — as you are running a full BEAM node.
    

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