What’s the status of the project?

[timonweb]

Hi, I was looking for a way to use Phoenix inside Electron and found this project. Great idea, but ithere haven’t been much activity recently. What’s the status of the project? Are there any roadblocks?

[dominicletz]

This project uses wxWidgets embedded WebView to create an Electron style experience. While this works it is still pretty finicky to get right deploy on all 5 currently supported platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS)

Pain points are:

• Not all default OTP-Builds come with the WebView activated, so you typically need to build your own OTP
• Windows needs a couple of OTP patches to perform like a native app (be taskbar pinnable)
• NIFs are a big pain. They usually need some work to function and compile on Windows, and definitely work to be embedded on mobile (static compilation)
• Creating an installer and signing requires manually getting signature keys from Apple / Microsoft for your company/organization.
• wxWidgets WebViews are using platform native renderers (Edge WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on MacOS, GTKWebView on Linux), these have slight differences and not a lot of APIs are exported.

Still we're shipping a production app with this project to mobile and desktop https://diode.io/download/#download-app -- So it is definitely possible if you bring the dedication.

Things I would like to improve:

• Prepare and and download on demand OTP builds for all platforms
• Move wxWebView dependency outside, so other webviews can be used
• Improve installer creation and automatic signing

[timonweb]

Hi @dominicletz thank you for such a detailed reply. Looks a bit tricky! Have you heard about the https://nativephp.com/ project? They somehow managed to embed PHP into the Electron, maybe that would help and provide some ideas. I'll download you app to see how it's functioning. Cheers!

[dominicletz]

Thanks for that link I'll check it out, it would be definitely nice to re-use something like electron. It seems though like they're now maintaining their own electron fork... anyway I'll have a closer look.