Live data from Hacker News

Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

phoenixframework.org

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chris: how do you feel about what's needed to make Phoenix as "core" of a technology like other similar projects like Django or Rails? The latter are used by huge companies, which have vested interest in keeping these technologies around and evolving. Is it corporate sponsorship from companies using Phoenix? Note, I've used Phoenix/Elixir as the core technology in the last of the 3 companies I've been in.

Ruby companies like AirBNB, Stripe ended up edging out their competitors using the relatively glacial Java or C++ frameworks. We will need to see a new generation of Phoenix winners before Elixir is taken seriously. It could be that the marginal performance gain from using Elixir is not worth the hassle of training and hiring in a whole new language. It remains to be seen.

Just a small nit-pick here. If we're talking REST/graphql stateless APIs, sure the scalability gains may be a harder sell vs throwing hardware at the problem, but the value-add depends on what's being built. I built Phoenix first and foremost for real-time, stateful web applications. So anything that requires websockets, frequent updates, PubSub, presence, etc, you will be extremely hard to match what our stack provides out of the box, performance wise, and distribution wise. Not everyone needs these things but increasingly companies do, ie chats, social feeds, dashboards, and now LiveView-like interactive applications all change the equation from "marginal" perf gains.

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chris: how do you feel about what's needed to make Phoenix as "core" of a technology like other similar projects like Django or Rails? The latter are used by huge companies, which have vested interest in keeping these technologies around and evolving. Is it corporate sponsorship from companies using Phoenix? Note, I've used Phoenix/Elixir as the core technology in the last of the 3 companies I've been in.

We're already there. We have huge companies using elixir and phoenix, with phoenix powering the web platform for the majority of them. Several great case studies exist on elixir-lang.org if you're interested, ie: Pepsi: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/04/02/marketing-and-sales-... Heroku: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/09/24/paas-with-elixir-at-... Change.org https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/delivering-so…

It's worked out really well for us at PepsiCo, it's basically our go to for in house application development on the eCommerce side. We'll be hiring some elixir devs again soon.

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When learning elixir and phoenix, it is hard to find updated tutorials. Whenever I try an youtube tutorial, there is always an error. Can you share some updated links/books for a beginner?

Not op, but for me the official elixir site's guide help a lot. I actually read that side by side with Sasa Juric's Elixir in Action and felt like I got a pretty good understanding of elixir. For Phoenix, I've just been using the guide in phoenix's hexdocs and reading some random blogs about anything specific.

Thanks!

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but for me the official elixir site's guide help a lot. I actually read that side by side with Sasa Juric's Elixir in Action and felt like I got a pretty good understanding of elixir. For Phoenix, I've just been using the guide in phoenix's hexdocs and reading some random blogs about anything specific.

These are great suggestions. The getting started guides on Elixir and Phoenix get you moving with the basics. Beyond that, Programming Elixir, Elixir in Action, and Programming Phoenix are great book options.

Thanks!

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#26
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When learning elixir and phoenix, it is hard to find updated tutorials. Whenever I try an youtube tutorial, there is always an error. Can you share some updated links/books for a beginner?

I bookmarked this one from the last discussion of Phoenix on HN: https://sergiotapia.com/phoenix-160-liveview-esbuild-tailwin...

Thanks!

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#27

Phoenix creator here – I'm happy to answer any questions about elixir, phoenix, or this release!

Hey Chris! Is there a LiveView future where one can forego javascript frameworks altogether in creating higher-fidelity UIs?

That's really the goal, and for a large class of applications we are already there. Higher-fidelity UIs is pretty vague and there is absolutely a limit to where you necessarily need a bunch of code running on the client. Google maps & docs? Millions of lines of JS is inescapable, but dashboards, feeds, chats? LiveView excels here. We don't yet know where the limit is, but if you look at Livebook, we have a collaborative code notebook with presence, realtime updates across users and operational-transform based content updates powered by LiveView, with only ~3k lines of basic JavaScript for the client-side bits like the Monaco editor.

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#28
Looks good.

In one of the HEEx examples in this post it mentions components and uses a weather component as an example with:

I'm curious, what would the syntax look like if you wanted to create something like a card component that has an optional header, body and footer where you would want your arguments to be blocks of arbitrary HTML that you pass in and not a single string variable?

Basically a way to do something like this (a more simplified version since I don't know what the API would be):

    
        

Custom stuff!

And then the component itself would have a named "yield" that places in your arbitrary blocks of code in the correct spot.

I think this might be called slots in other frameworks, but they seem essential to be able to create re-usable components unless HEEx has an undocumented way to do this? It looks like Surface has this at https://surface-ui.org/slots.

What are the benefits of using HEEx over Surface? I know they're working together and in the end will share similar functionality and maybe Surface will use HEEx under the hood but as an end user building web applications with Phoenix is there a single case where I would use HEEx instead of Surface? If not, why isn't Surface part of core Phoenix or not heavily pushed as what to use for a templating solution in the docs?

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#29

Phoenix creator here – I'm happy to answer any questions about elixir, phoenix, or this release!

When learning elixir and phoenix, it is hard to find updated tutorials. Whenever I try an youtube tutorial, there is always an error. Can you share some updated links/books for a beginner?

For liveview there's Programming Phoenix LiveView[1]. The stuff on https://pragmaticstudio.com should also be up to date. You can also check out the newsletter http://elixirweekly.net.

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liv...

Re: Phoenix 1.6, RC0 released

#30

I like how Phoenix had the stones to replace webpack after all the additional support requests it was bringing in. I've been using esbuild with 1.6.0-dev and it is a lot more ergonomic for the end user dev - https://sergiotapia.com/phoenix-160-liveview-esbuild-tailwin... What has me really excited was that I was looking at Fly.io to create a global mesh of servers for a liveview app so people can connect to whatever…

Yeah, fly.io seems like a great fit for many of Phoenix's use cases. I'm really excited to see how things shape up.
Post reply on HN