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

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

#141

Post by ketan_anjaria »

bcardarella wrote: post #132
chriszhu12 wrote: post #29

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 f…

The other side of that coin is the huge amount of unmaintained risk in the Ruby community. When you delegate business logic to someone else's efforts you taking on the risk that the library will be maintained and patched for the lifespan of your application. As someone else already pointed out, many of the solutions in Elixir are significantly more simple to just "roll your own" rather than have to worry about pullin…

That's the same risk you have with any open source project. Elixir and Phoenix have similar risks. I think there's a lot to be said for getting default/easy functionality for free so you can focus on building your unique amazing things vs working on plumbing.

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

#142

Post by rubyn00bie »

czbond wrote: post #120
rubyn00bie wrote: post #30

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…

I feel your pain on SPA's.... I feel like code velocity drops on small teams. What about LiveView/Phoenix made the process more enjoyable - let's call it 'less painful'?

Oh, yeah, here we go:

1. Tooling, yeah, you gotta have node installed, but that's pretty much the last time you have to touch it. I'm not anti-node or anti-js by any means, but the tooling around them often turns me off. Getting to do front-end work without _having_ to think about 'em is a breath of fresh air.

2. Less duplication of effort. I don't need to define schemas twice... once in the "backend" and once in the "frontend" application. You don't think this is bad until you spend two hours adding a adding, removing, or changing a simple property to your application because you have to update the backend, the backend's api docs, its tests. Then on the frontend, adjust the schema, adjust the frontend tests, and finally see if it's working.

3. Faster iteration. I prepare a new context, and can immediately consume it in a view. Views are reloaded instantly when changes are made during development reducing the time it takes to get feedback and increasing how fast I get shit done. Also less duplication of effort REALLY helps here...

4. We (at least me) got S(F)PA idea totally fucking backwards. The idea isn't to make you're entire web site a Single Fucking Page Application, but to make individual (single) pages which NEED TO function like applications do so... Quintessential examples that do _NOT_ need an SPA: a fucking FAQ, about, or contact pages. In fact, having an "application" on top of them is more burden than not.

5. CSS is really powerful these days and provides a lot of what the 2008-2012 JS movement was trying to do. If I combine that, with being able to re-render only part of the page, I've got almost the entire flexibility of what SPAs offer with almost none of the complexity.

6. Going to a new page, and causing a page refresh, but totally knowing the next page isn't going to be broken because of the previous page's state. Page refreshes are awesome. Growing up on 28.8k that wasn't the case, but ever since I got above 10Mbps its really not something I ever even notice (though I do notice when pages are broken that shouldn't be because they're SPAs and not just fucking content).

I could probably keep rambling but I'll stop here...

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

#143

Post by brightball »

mercer wrote: post #103
scythmic_waves wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, it's worth noting that Elixir would have difficulty _ever_ becoming statically typed because of how message-passing works. For example, if you look at Gleam [0] -- the recent project that's trying to create a statically typed language for the BEAM -- it can't handle message-passing [1]. And I totally agree with you here: > I've found that it's possible to pretend it is a statically typed language if y…

I've heard a number of times that static typing would be near impossible for Erlang because of how message-passing works, but just the other day I read a quote where one of the creators (I think it was Joe Armstrong, but not completely certain) indicated that the primary reason they decided against static typing was the hot code reloading, not the feasibility. or not primarily anyways. Not disagreeing with you, I gue…

It’s a combination of message passing to distributed nodes AND hot reloading. The compiler guarantees would only work on your current node, but if you were sending something to another node in the cluster you have zero knowledge of the types without forcing a full contract exchange on connection.

There’s a lot of problems introduced by that.

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

#145

Post by jakearmitage »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #99
jakearmitage wrote: post #76

How would this scale for, I don't know, 10k concurrent users? Would a live chat app be reasonable?

A live chat app is its sweet spot. It runs on the same Erlang VM that Whatsapp used to scale to hundreds of millions of users on under 30 machines and very few employees.

Excuse my lack of knowledge, but I was always under the impression that websockets are not that scalable since you are opening 1:1 connections.

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

#146

Post by jeremyjh »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #53
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…

> When I say perfect, I mean, there has been never once in my career where I hit a roadblock due to the language's limitation or complexity or flawed assumption. I faced this with other languages, but not Elixir. This is pretty amazing praise! Are many of the other languages you've used strongly typed? That's the thing that gives me pause - I feel like I rely on the compiler a lot in languages where it can do a lot f…

I've been programming Elixir professionally for three years. I wish Elixir was statically typed, but there isn't a statically typed language that I really like better all around. I've done a lot of Haskell development but it seems like I always spent too much time playing type tetris and polishing abstractions instead of getting work done. Elixir feels more static than most dynamic languages; you'll get compile errors or warnings if function arity doesn't match or if you use names that are undefined. There is a static analyzer called Dialyzer that can detect a lot of errors you'd catch with static language compiler such as passing the wrong type to a function (often, even if there are no type specs defined). Yet at the same time you get the benefits of a dynamic language with excellent meta-programming capabilities.

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

#147

Post by dnautics »

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…

I'll say Elixir isn't perfect. There are a few annoying bits that won't be changed due to backwards compatibility, that 98% of people won't run into. For example:

    a = [foo: "bar", foo: "baz"]
    Keyword.get(a, :foo)   #==> gives you "bar"
    a[:foo]                #==> gives you "bar"
    my_struct = struct(SomeStructWithFoo, a)
    my_struct.foo          #==> gives you "baz"
But really, this minor, minor inconsistency is near the top of my list of complaints, so... Take that into consideration.

Also, if you start coding in Elixir a lot, you will write better Javascript by importing good practices in from Elixir.

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

#148

Post by dnautics »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #53
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…

> When I say perfect, I mean, there has been never once in my career where I hit a roadblock due to the language's limitation or complexity or flawed assumption. I faced this with other languages, but not Elixir. This is pretty amazing praise! Are many of the other languages you've used strongly typed? That's the thing that gives me pause - I feel like I rely on the compiler a lot in languages where it can do a lot f…

Over time I find my Elixir is more and more "statically typed". Since you get access to basically the full language at compile time, with a bit of hand-coding you can opt-in to features that statically type critical sections of your code at compile time. Critically important things can be guarded by relatively advanced checking, if you want to get really clever you can yank those checks for performance in prod deployments. I have been doing this with configurations, so that configs are checked at compile time instead of at deploy time, and I'm pretty happy with it.

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

#149

Post by dnautics »

jswny wrote: post #139
mattste wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree about Elixir and its surrounding ecosystem being almost perfect. It's insane how simple the building blocks are and how easy the code is to read and write. Here are a few pain points I've ran into: 1. Typespecs leave something to be desired compared to other type systems 2. Maps vs structs and easily using one in place of the other Things that my team would like to see: 1. Components in addition to templ…

Hey, just a friendly Elixir user here! Could you explain why you think that maps vs. structs is a pain point? I found this interesting because I personally really like how they are so similar, because you can almost always manipulate a struct like a map, just like you'd expect. It lets you use standard operations for working with structs.

Not GP, but: You can't use trivially use [] dereferencing notation with structs, or, for that matter get_in or put_in, without first making it access protocol compliant (which maybe you shouldn't do? I haven't figured that out for myself yet). A common use case for me is initializing a GenServer with a kwl, which is nice for your code prettiness, but you'd like to also support maps, because that fits with how the internal state of the GenServer looks. Then when you go to refactor your GenServer to use a struct because you prefer a more solid typesystem, you can run into a minor stumbling block and slightly uglier code. Not insurmountable though, and you're writing tests right? Once those tests pass you've got nothing to worry about.
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