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Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

phoenixframework.org

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Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#21

Post by chrismccord »

chrismccord wrote: post #19
Scarbutt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are running this on localhost but won't interactions be slow if a user is 200ms from the server? Re-rendering templates every time on things that require high interaction also seems very expensive and an easy way to slow down your server when you have multiple users correct? or what I'm missing?

you are correct, you can't escape the laws of physics latency wise, but most web things we are all building, including 100% JavaScript apps require a round trip to the server. For example I can't post tweet without a round trip to twitter. On the LiveView side UX wise, we apply css loading states to the interacted elements, so the user is provided feedback while awaiting an acknowledgement. On the server, our templat…

I also forgot to mention we provide optimistic UI features with our loading states and annotations. For example, in the screencast, the "Save" button has phx-disable-with="Saving...", which applies on client instantly and stays until an ack is received. You can leverage the loading states as well to toggle entire containers for a happy medium between traditional optimistic and instant user feedback.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#22

Post by zeroc8 »

thebigshane wrote: post #8
chrismccord wrote: post #2

We are really excited about this release! I also wanted the screencast to be a single take, so I'm happy to answer questions if there are gaps to fill in for things I could have explained more clearly.

First of all, great demo, and great showcase for this technology. I think it did a great job of showing its strengths to traditionally backend developers like me. I also appreciated the twitter analogy. I just couldn't help but think "Wait, Twitter doesn't have 'Update/Edit Post'!" :) I've heard that Blazor in the .net world has similar goals to LiveView, but I haven't gotten into it much. Can anyone confirm?

Yes, there are two Blazor variants. Serverside Blazor is basically the same thing as Phoenix Live View, client side Blazor is providing some optimized Mono runtime as webassembly.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#23

Post by buf »

faizshah wrote: post #17

Question to the former Rails devs out there: We mostly see threads fawn over Elixir and Phoenix, have you experienced any downsides to switching? Anything you miss from Rails? I'm convinced to give it a try after that demo!

Also curious. I've been a django user for 5 years and a rails user for 9 years. I mostly use rails as an API these days and a React app for the front end.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#24

Post by _odey »

chrismccord wrote: post #2

We are really excited about this release! I also wanted the screencast to be a single take, so I'm happy to answer questions if there are gaps to fill in for things I could have explained more clearly.

I'm really amazed this sort of functionality can be implemented in such a nice and clean manner. Your presentation is mind blowing!

Just out of curiosity (please don't consider this as a feature request, more like a thought exercise), in case you wanted the application to have offline editing functionality, could the framework provide it in a similar manner? having a generic JS handler that manages pushing state when an internet connection is available again and exposing hooks that you can implement to handle data consistency? Of course in this case the data payload passed through sockets would be bigger as you would need some identifiers to make sure for example increments don't get duplicated, and there could potentially be different strategies for solving data conflicts (CRDTs for example). But would it need extra back-end support for this or would it be enough to have engineers manage state through the current handlers?

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#25

Post by thruflo »

codegeek wrote: post #12

I have been watching Phoenix/Elixir for a while and wondering if it has gained a lot more traction compared to say 2 years ago ? My choice of full web app framwork is Symfony/Laravel (PHP) or Python (Flask/Django) but I really like what Phoenix has to offer. However, does it have a mature ecosystem now ? What about deployments and tools around it ? Does it work with generic web servers like Nginx or does it run its o…

I’m a long time Python dev converted to Elixir (for ~3 years now, mainly web dev and data pipelines).

The tooling and developer experience in Elixir is first class and the ecosystem is highly mature.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#26

Post by yachtman »

neya wrote: post #14

I was a Rails user for almost a decade. I switched to Phoenix/Elixir 3 years ago. Elixir is a super simple language. It has no OO concepts and everything is functions first. In fact, it's so good that I started teaching it for universities. All my production web applications are now fully on Elixir. Elixir is one of those languages where everything has been done perfectly as of the time of this comment. When I say pe…

Can you explain in your own words for elixir where the balance between "joy" (productivity, flow, whatever you want to call it) and what you call "rethinking the way you write code". As another example of a functional oriented language that prides itself in the same thing look at Haskell. I wouldn't say most people think that Haskell is an easy or productive language (that is until after you have years of experience under your belt), but it definitely forces you to rethink how you code. Scala is another example, but draws the line at a different place. How is where elixir draws the line preferable in your opinion?

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#27

Post by itake »

faizshah wrote: post #17

Question to the former Rails devs out there: We mostly see threads fawn over Elixir and Phoenix, have you experienced any downsides to switching? Anything you miss from Rails? I'm convinced to give it a try after that demo!

It seems like a lot of companies are moving to Go for fast services. As a rails dev for 10+ years, I am looking at Go instead of Elixir and Phoenix, b/c Go is a much more popular language than Elixir.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#28

Post by scraplab »

faizshah wrote: post #17

Question to the former Rails devs out there: We mostly see threads fawn over Elixir and Phoenix, have you experienced any downsides to switching? Anything you miss from Rails? I'm convinced to give it a try after that demo!

There's so much to like about Elixir/Phoenix. The only real downside I've experienced is that there isn't the range of libraries available compared to Ruby/Rails. That said, many of the libraries that do exist are of a decent quality with good documentation, and easy to contribute to where you need to.

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#29

Post by chriszhu12 »

I've been following this project for 5 years now, and I've really hoped it would take off. However, part of what made (and to some extent, still makes) the Rails framework so great is the surrounding ecosystem of well supported gems that makes building tedious things a breeze.

I built a few things in Phoenix in the past, and while the core framework is very simple and elegant to use, I recall having to write my own file uploading library because the one that existed had almost no documentation. This made me really hesitant to adopt Elixir / Phoenix stack for any projects I'm serious about.

I was hoping there was a world where most of the old rails community moved onto phoenix, but in the time this project has been around, it seems the backend web stack has really fragmented into a multitude of Node, Go, python, etc, while Phoenix hasn't really grown its mindshare.

For former Rails / Django devs who has made the switch: what are your thoughts on this?

Re: Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5

#30

Post by rubyn00bie »

Oh, holy crap, I'm stoked, as someone who has just started using LiveView after like too many years of single page apps... all I can say, is "oh fuck, did we get it wrong." The experience is truly great. Also, LiveComponents are pretty awesome since they don't have their own process, just mount in existing LiveView, it makes 'em really easy to reuse and performant (at least from my experience so far).

Writing UI code, in a language/environment that has first class support of pattern matching is like a dream for me. Seriously, pattern matching is sooo good when you don't have fucking classes and objects and bullshit "abstractions" in the way of your data.

Also, if you took a stab at it before 1.5, try it again. This release has all the goodies to make it nice and documentation to go with it... I'm stoked to delete the phx.live generators I copy-pasta'd into my repo from phx master a couple weeks ago trying to get my bearings.

Truly awesome work on this! Thank you so much.

Also, pro-tip, use the generators at least once, even if you have already used live view without 'em, because now there's more or less an official pattern for how to organize yer live code and it really helps.

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