Scenic is a functional UI library for Elixir with which you can build applications for many supported operating systems; including macOS, Windows and Nerves/Linux.
It's also reasonably lightweight, with a Scenic+Nerves firmware image clocking in at ~30MB.
Scenic is a great way to add a simple UI to your Nerves application (or any Elixir app) without having to include a web browser to render HTML and JavaScript. This reduces complexity and keeps deployment simple.
For complex, rich UIs, i'd still recommend using web technologies and
deploying using nerves-web-kiosk.
Even SpaceX used JavaScript for rendering the GUI in their new
Dragon capsule!
We're using Scenic to render simple user feedback for smart-home-security-system,
where its small size and simplicity makes it a perfect fit!
We'll build a simple "Hello world!" Scenic application that will help us to understand how Scenic works!
This guide presumes that you've got Elixir installed, and you have a good understanding of how it works. If not, go visit dwyl/learn-elixir and learn some more!
Scenic goes to great lengths to minimize its dependencies, but we still need to install a few so Elixir can talk to your OS' graphics stack.
Graphics Library FrameWork. This is a library that allows Scenic to manage application windows, as well as handle keyboard and mouse input.
openGL Extension Wrangler. This helps Scenic load and query extensions to the OpenGL framework.
On macOS, you can easily install these through Homebrew:
brew install glfw3 glew pkg-config
pkg-config is probaly already installed, its used to configure packages and load libraries
For other systems, check the official documentation: https://hexdocs.pm/scenic/install_dependencies.html#content
Scenic, like Phoenix and Nerves, comes with a Generator to spin your project up quickly, so lets install that now.
mix archive.install hex scenic_new