Our great sponsors
-
-
zig
General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
-
-
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
From the moment we discovered Tauri, we really felt like this was the perfect fit. The API is really solid, the configuration files are minimal and easy to understand, and the usage of Rust makes it way easier to add new functionalities and think about interesting ways of interoperating with Elixir via the Rustler library.
The answer was given by the Elixir community with burrito which enables users to pack up everything an Elixir application needs within a binary namely Zig Archiver to package the binary and Zig Wrapper that wraps the Erlang Virtual Machine to be used in multiple platforms (Zig + Rust in the same project 🤯).
The biggest benefits we derived from Tauri were Wry and the sidecar mechanism. Wry (the second half of Tauri: tao/wry) is a cross-platform WebView rendering library in Rust that supports all major desktop platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It essentially spins up a native web view from whatever operating system it’s running on and doesn’t require an application to bundle one with it. Wry greatly reduces the overhead of “pushing” a browser to our users, instead leaning on the host OS to handle rendering a web view. This made our applications really lean.
Fortunately the Elixir community already had a similar issue with Tailwind so we used the same methodology where we download the required dependencies into our Phoenix _build folder and run from there.
The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.
The answer was given by the Elixir community with burrito which enables users to pack up everything an Elixir application needs within a binary namely Zig Archiver to package the binary and Zig Wrapper that wraps the Erlang Virtual Machine to be used in multiple platforms (Zig + Rust in the same project 🤯).
This was all in a new library that is still work in progress but very promising. We are eager to get contributions from the community. Learn more at ex_tauri on GitHub.
The answer was given by the Elixir community with burrito which enables users to pack up everything an Elixir application needs within a binary namely Zig Archiver to package the binary and Zig Wrapper that wraps the Erlang Virtual Machine to be used in multiple platforms (Zig + Rust in the same project 🤯).
Thus, we set out to build a desktop application using a LiveView from the Phoenix Framework in Elixir. For the uninitiated, a LiveView is a process that receives events, updates its state, and renders updates to a page as diffs. The LiveView programming model is declarative: instead of saying “once event X happens, change Y on the page”, events in LiveView are regular messages which may cause changes to its state.
For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.
The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.
For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.
Change dependencies to use crates.io instead of folders such is the default behavior of tauri init
For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.