> When did you last use it?
I gave it a fair shake a few times.
Once when it first came out, then again a year later and then again 6 months ago.
Lack of hooks wasn't a concern I had at the time. It was more around core behavior of the library and critical features that were missing. Some of those features have been added after I posted about them but all that did was destroy any confidence I had in using LV because these are things that would have been encountered on day 1 of deploying a single LV app to production. We're talking huge things, like how to invalidate and update assets in the of your page in a user friendly way.
It left an impression on me that LV isn't really being used much in real world apps by the team developing it. I could be wrong of course but that's the impression it left. Plus it feels like it's taking a really long time for certain features to make their way into the library. For example file uploads took something like 18 months to go from being talked about publicly to getting an alpha release and now it feels like it's on the burden of the community to test this in production without really knowing much about the feature.
That and the docs still leave a lot to be desired (especially around the time I read them) and the story for the last ~18 months is that since LV is a pre 1.0 release the docs aren't really written up yet since stuff is changing all the time. I know docs take a long time to write (I've written literally over a million words of blog posts / course notes / documentation) but docs and practical examples are also the most important thing IMO to nudge folks into using something.
Personally I don't want to have to read minimal docs, API specs and dive into the source code that I can't read very well because there's a lot of macros to see how something works just to use it effectively. Especially if I'm on the front lines of having to pioneer the tech, which means I'll probably be under pressure to report and fix bugs that I don't know how to fix.
I don't know. All of this experience with LV and Elixir / Phoenix really made me understand that this tech stack is not for me. Especially not when Hotwire Turbo exists and works with any back-end language and it also has proof of it being used in a mission critical massive SAAS application (https://hey.com). That leaves me super confident that it'll work for me (and it has been), even outside of Rails.
Maybe in 5+ years I'll try Elixir again (hopefully Stripe and other payment providers have Elixir clients by then!), because the core Elixir eco-system in general has a bunch of nice things. It just doesn't feel optimized yet for building applications (IMO). At least not compared to most other web frameworks.
Also, while I don't use Laravel I also have major respect for Caleb Porzio. He created Laravel's version of Live View (LiveWire)[0] by himself. It mainly uses HTTP and he also has a ton of docs / videos on implementing practical application features with it. He shipped 2 major versions and everything about its API and docs just oozes creating something made for developers to develop applications. It's funny how a slightly different position on something can make something explode in popularity.
I haven't even written a single line of Laravel and have no intention on switching to it, but his presentation and execution of an open source library is something I admire.
[0]: https://laravel-livewire.com/