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How we got to LiveView

fly.io

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Re: How we got to LiveView

#2
Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

Re: How we got to LiveView

#3
> I created Phoenix to build real-time applications. Before it could even render HTML, Phoenix supported real-time messaging. To do that, Phoenix provides an abstraction called Channels.

I think it's really neat that Chris started out with real-time messaging. When I first started working with web frameworks, it definitely felt like real-time stuff was an afterthought—a layer built atop an older model that leaked a lot of the details.

Working with LV has been an absolute delight. Need to render a PDF and download? Fire off a `Task.async` to render in a separate thread on the backend. When it's done, that thread can just `send` a message to the LV process to update the UI that the PDF is ready. So easy and painless. LV really hits a sweet spot for me: I'm primarily a backend dev, but with LV I can build really nice stuff on the front-end with minimal effort/headache from NPM.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#4

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

Hey Chris! First, a huge thank you for making this. I started playing around with LV v0.2 or something. It's definitely come a long way since then!

I've read the blog post about getting 2 million concurrent connections on a single server with minimal tuning. That's pretty mind blowing. How does that compare will real-world scalability with LV? Like, can I actually have 2 million people looking at a LV simultaneously? I think the worry I hear most is whether or not LV scales. I've personally never run into any problems at all, but the projects I've built with LV haven't been the highest-traffic apps.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#5

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

I’m in love with LiveView havent done much Elixir yet but I do Django and have done ASP .NET in the past. I think its a brilliant concept. The only thing kind of holding me back on using Phoenix with personal projects and ideas is really the authentication stuff not being built-in (or when I looked I got this impression). I’m curious do you ever see Phoenix being fully supporting all the vitals or was your decision not to include authentication based on modern approaches differing like JWTs and such? Curious I am definitely going to use it in the future. As a backend nerd I always held love for Erlang and I think Phoenix / Elixir are my real way into the ecosystem.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#6

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

Thanks for your work, this really looks promising!

One question I keep thinking about. What if I want to still use React on the frontend, does it still make sense to use Phoenix for the backend then or am I throwing all benefits over board then?

Re: How we got to LiveView

#7
We use Phoenix and LiveView to power all of our non-video interactions on Glimesh.tv[0] and the immediate out of the box features and performance are unmatched. LiveView allowed us to get a completely real time updating channel where streamers can edit their metadata (game, title, viewer count, etc) and all of the viewers can see it in real time. Not to mention we implemented a distributed chat system that sends message updates in real time to both browser clients and API clients. Both of these features combined amount to less than 1000 lines of code and "just work" across multiple web nodes.

It can be daunting to jump into such a strange world as a LiveView environment may look (Elixir syntax, OTP terminology, etc) but honestly once you dig in deeper, everything just makes sense. LiveView (and HEEx) continue to be very simple to understand abstractions on top of the rock solid OTP platform. It's a joy to build real time applications using it, and I very much appreciate the "developer experience" focus both Chris & Jose have for us Elixir devs!

I'm excited for the launch of Phoenix 1.6 and HEEx is shaping up to be a complete replacement for your traditional SPA + Backend API, and using one consistent language for your full stack really has very freeing & powerful benefits, especially for small teams!

[0] https://github.com/Glimesh/glimesh.tv/

Re: How we got to LiveView

#8

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

I’m in love with LiveView havent done much Elixir yet but I do Django and have done ASP .NET in the past. I think its a brilliant concept. The only thing kind of holding me back on using Phoenix with personal projects and ideas is really the authentication stuff not being built-in (or when I looked I got this impression). I’m curious do you ever see Phoenix being fully supporting all the vitals or was your decision n…

There's been some progress on this front, I believe:

- https://hexdocs.pm/phx_gen_auth/overview.html

Re: How we got to LiveView

#9

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

Thanks for your work! One question I had is about when it comes to expanding beyond the web, what are the solutions available with Phoenix? For example, if I'm making a web app using LiveView, do I need to make a second app for my API for an iOS app?

Re: How we got to LiveView

#10

Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!

I’m in love with LiveView havent done much Elixir yet but I do Django and have done ASP .NET in the past. I think its a brilliant concept. The only thing kind of holding me back on using Phoenix with personal projects and ideas is really the authentication stuff not being built-in (or when I looked I got this impression). I’m curious do you ever see Phoenix being fully supporting all the vitals or was your decision n…

The Phoenix 1.6 release candidate has been out for a few weeks, and we now include a `phx.gen.auth` generator for a fully bootstrapped authentication solution: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/1.6.0-rc.1/mix_phx_gen_auth.html
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