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Phoenix 1.0

phoenixframework.org

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Re: Phoenix 1.0

#81

Post by rdtsc »

ffn wrote: post #33

This is awesome! I've been working with Phoenix for a bit now, and aside from the fact hex/phoenix doesn't yet have all the libraries that rubygems/rails have, Phoenix has blown my expectations out of the water. For such a big and complex framework, the entire functional plug system (functional is love, functional is life) makes the whole thing easy to grok in a way utterly unimaginable in a traditional rails framewo…

I haven't done much either with Elixir or Ruby (I do more Python and Erlang). But one thing I noticed is Valim (and others on the team) created a really approachable langauge and framework. Their emphasis on new comers, documentation, friendliness of community is outstanding.

Also Elixir will bring more people to the BEAM VM and take advantage of it, as I think it is a gem of engineering.

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#82

Post by mrspeaker »

jonathonf wrote: post #49
skrause wrote: post #43

If this framework gets too popular they'll probably rename it to Firebird. Let's just hope there isn't already another open source software called Firebird.

Yes, there is [1]. That's the reason Firefox is Firefox (Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox). [1] http://www.firebirdsql.org/

I believe that's the joke! I usually never mind when projects have duplicate names, but c'mon, "Phoenix"?! Zero points for creativity there - I sure wish there were more things in history than rose from the ashes ;)

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#83

Post by jjbohn »

oomkiller wrote: post #73
rhizome31 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing what kind of project you develop? And even maybe what company you work for?

Can't say much about the details yet, but I work here: http://www.reactionhousing.com/ :)

That looks fun :)

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#84

Post by hartator »

oomkiller wrote: post #73
rhizome31 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing what kind of project you develop? And even maybe what company you work for?

Can't say much about the details yet, but I work here: http://www.reactionhousing.com/ :)

Maybe a stupid question, but why would you need something like exilir?

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#85

Post by fierycatnet »

oomkiller wrote: post #35

After spending nearly 7 years in the Ruby and Rails ecosystem, I changed jobs and have been working in with Elixir and Phoenix for nearly 3 months. I have been very satisfied with the process. The community is amazing, the tooling is unbeatable, and the quality and availability of open source libraries is great, especially for such a young project. The future looks very bright for Elixir and Phoenix!

Hypothetically speaking, why would you choose Phoenix over Rails for a new app?

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#87

Post by yellowapple »

mands wrote: post #61

Slightly off-topic, but can someone familiar with both Elixir and Erlang explain what Elixir provides in comparison to Erlang. I'm looking into using Erlang for a new project that requires extensive scaling and concurrency and am coming from a functional background so may be more comfortable with the traditional Erlang syntax. However it seems that perhaps more development and activity is happening on the Elixir side…

A lot of Elixir folks try to claim that the syntax doesn't matter. They're lying to themselves: of course the syntax matters. Not only is it much easier and more consistent for the human brain to parse (even more so than Ruby, in my opinion; unlike Ruby, everything that should take a block - like 'def' and 'defmodule' - do (pun intended) take a block), but it also goes above and beyond what Erlang offers with things like its pipe operator ('|>'), macro support, defaulting to binary strings (if you use double-quotes; single quotes are Erlang-style lists of characters, which - while they have their uses (aside from the obvious interoperability with Erlang code) - aren't really as efficient), and (in my observation) greater consistentcy between what you can do in the REPL ('iex') and what you can do in actual source files.

They're both great languages, but I think Elixir is a bit more refined, learning from Erlang's advantages and disadvantages and improving on them. It's basically what you get if you watch "Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel" [0] and actually try to write a language for Ruby hipsters with excellent taste in noserings while humming along to Bananarama :)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#88

Post by colbyh »

fierycatnet wrote: post #85
oomkiller wrote: post #35

After spending nearly 7 years in the Ruby and Rails ecosystem, I changed jobs and have been working in with Elixir and Phoenix for nearly 3 months. I have been very satisfied with the process. The community is amazing, the tooling is unbeatable, and the quality and availability of open source libraries is great, especially for such a young project. The future looks very bright for Elixir and Phoenix!

Hypothetically speaking, why would you choose Phoenix over Rails for a new app?

Better for building out services. Parallel processing. The supervised process abstractions are incredibly powerful.

If you're building another Twitter I would still use Rails. You'll be much more productive.

On the other hand, if you need to run parallel tasks or have mission-critical (aka can't go down for anything) work to be done I think you'll find Elixir the perfect combination of Ruby's syntax and Erlang's power.

Just my $.02 - I'm having a blast with Elixir at the moment.

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#89

Post by ghayes »

fierycatnet wrote: post #85
oomkiller wrote: post #35

After spending nearly 7 years in the Ruby and Rails ecosystem, I changed jobs and have been working in with Elixir and Phoenix for nearly 3 months. I have been very satisfied with the process. The community is amazing, the tooling is unbeatable, and the quality and availability of open source libraries is great, especially for such a young project. The future looks very bright for Elixir and Phoenix!

Hypothetically speaking, why would you choose Phoenix over Rails for a new app?

Phoenix shares many features with Ruby on Rails, e.g. a strong MVC model, an integrated ORM, a routing system, etc. What Phoenix on Elixir excels at is concurrency and distributed computing. For applications, this means you can have many active web sockets, for instance, where Rails applications tend to break down when you have too many active connections. Phoenix uses erlang processes for these tasks, which are lightweight and can number millions on a single machine.

As an example, Heroku uses cowboy (the erlang web server that Phoenix uses) for load-balancing incoming connections to all Heroku applications. The erlang VM (BEAM) is great for these types of highly concurrent, highly available, distributed tasks. The original use case for erlang was highly available phone switching for Ericsson.

Re: Phoenix 1.0

#90

Post by sasa555 »

pbreit wrote: post #26

When people choose to build on a more esoteric language such as Elixir (and to lesser extent Erlang) is it because what they want to do simply is not possible in Ruby/Python/Go/JavaScript/etc or just less efficient, elegant, productive, etc?

Everything is possible in a Turing complete language (assuming enough of base utility functions are provided by stdlib), so the question is not possible vs impossible, but how much of a help the tool is.

Erlang provides great abstractions for building fault-tolerant, scalable, distributed, soft real-time systems. That's not to say you can't do it with Erlang, but Erlang does give some simple, yet very powerful tools for making developer's life easier.

Without Erlang you have to work harder to get similar effects. Again, it's not impossible but there's more burden on developers because the runtime provides less guarantees. I elaborated a bit on the topic in the promo interview for my book (http://www.infoq.com/articles/elixir-in-action-erlang-review).

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