dart VS Papercups

I wrote a similar app for archivists to push materials into preservation repositories. I used Electron, since it has good cross-platform support. The source is at https://github.com/aptrust/dart with documentation at https://aptrust.github.io/dart-docs/users/getting_started/

The underlying JavaScript code in that app started getting messy because I was working on several other projects simultaneously, but you might find it useful to play with as you consider your desktop app.

The archival community uses a simple text-based packaging format from the Library of Congress called BagIt, which allows you to include metadata and checksums with your archived materials so you can ensure their integrity and make sense of them when you get them back.

Anyway, you're working on an interesting problem. I'd be interested to see how it goes.

The best language for the task at hand, when presented with time constraints, is the one that you already know well. OP said in the article that they authored Papercups [1]. Adopting Elixir for a websocket-push service makes a lot of sense, then. However, why don't you learn Elixir, some OTP, and then reconsider that question? You could be missing out.

[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups - 5.2k stars, uses Phoenix 1.6

Papercups

Shameless plug here if anyone is interested in an open source live chat tool check out https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

Phoneix - Elixir

We're a live message tool and it is basically what Elixir is built for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups.

The Elixir community has been great and incredibly friendly. I originally was worried about the size of the community but that hasn't been an issue the community has been super helpful. I also think the annual stackoverflow usage surveys are very misleading because most of the community's questions get asked in ElixirForum and not on Stackoverflow.

Phoneix is the web framework of Elixir which is very similar to Rails but minus a lot of the magic has been very helpful for our productivity as well.

If I had to built another service that is websocket heavy I would definitely use Elixir. Even if it was a standard crud app I would still most likely choose Elixir.