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How we got to LiveView

fly.io

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Re: How we got to LiveView

#31

Post by ketzo »

foofoobar wrote: post #6
chrismccord wrote: post #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!

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?

As a personal testament: I did this for a side project, and it worked perfectly. Phoenix does very well as "just" an API/backend environment.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#32

Post by staticelf »

chrismccord wrote: post #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!

Are you guys looking into the Web Transport protocol for the future? Right now you have to tunnel the websocket connections over http2 and it will probably be the same for http3 afaik.

I know there is this work in progress (https://w3c.github.io/webtransport/) and websockets are probably fine for a long time but sooner or later (unless there is an update to websockets) it will probably be faster to just do normal http requests and listen on server sent events.

What are your thoughts for Liveview for the future? Will it forever stay on websockets or would you be open to change the underlying technology if / when new stuff becomes available?

Re: How we got to LiveView

#33

Post by giancarlostoro »

chrismccord wrote: post #10
giancarlostoro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice! I'm glad to see this, I'll definitely see about trying this out soon then. So I guess its really just a matter of time while Phoenix grows. Although from what I've seen it seems to have everything else I need.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#34

Post by jarpineh »

chrismccord wrote: post #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!

Hi.

I got a couple of things:

I seem to remember in the original announcement presentation there was a demo of SVG being updated inside a page 60 times per second. All from server. Did this actually become feasible? I’m thinking graphs and maps with live data. I might not need as smooth animation there. Though that could make for nice dashboards.

Other bit that interests me is web apps for long running tasks. What’s the story in Phoenix and Elixir land for handling external shell processes from web requests? I’m trying to do lightweight job control without investing into separate systems for processing pipelines, CI/CD and the like.

Thank you for Live View. It continues to be an inspiration even though I haven’t yet had a chance to dive into server side of it.

Re: How we got to LiveView

#35

Post by sgrytoyr »

chrismccord wrote: post #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!

Almost every time I see a discussion about LiveView there’s someone complaining about the issue of latency/lag, and how it makes LiveView unsuitable for real-world applications.

From what I understand, the issue is that every event that happens on the client (say, a click) has to make a roundtrip to the server before the UI can be updated. If latency is high, this can make for a poor user experience, the argument goes.

As the creator of LiveView, what’s your take on this? Is it a real and difficult-to-solve issue, or do people just not see "the LiveView way" of solving it?

I think LiveView looks amazing, but this possible issue (in addition to chronic lack of time) has made me a little unsure of whether it’s ready to use for a real project.

Thanks for creating Phoenix, btw!

Re: How we got to LiveView

#36

Post by yewenjie »

chrismccord wrote: post #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!

Hi, really excited about the new release - Heex and Esbuild support is fantastic.

Do you think it is possible for newcomers to pick up Phoenix and at the same time learn how frameworks work? For example, FastAPI [0] is a widely extensive Python framework yet its documentation essentially is just a long tutorial which explains basic web-development concepts while teaching its core. OTOH, almost all Phoenix learning material I have come across so far are targeted to experienced devs (especially Rails).

I really love that Phoenix is opinionated but I feel like there should be some ways to learn about the rationale behind those choices, without having 10 years of development intuition.

[0] https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/

Re: How we got to LiveView

#37

Post by mrkurt »

whitepoplar wrote: post #30
chrismccord wrote: post #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!

If one wanted to learn LiveView today, what's the best resource to learn? Also, will there be improvements to the LiveView latency story (if it's even possible) when providing a service to a global audience? Thanks for all your work!

Non technical Fly.io founder here: LiveView and Elixir work very well distributed all over the world. Here's an example app I fumbled my way through to show it in action: https://liveview-counter.fly.dev/

Re: How we got to LiveView

#38

Post by sodapopcan »

nightpool wrote: post #16
chrismccord wrote: post #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!

I've tried to get into Phoenix a few different times, but I've always been stymied by the unfamiliarity of Elixir's syntax, especially codebases that made heavy use of composition and guard clauses, meaning that the business logic was scattered across a half-dozen different files which had to be read in sequence to understand a single web request. This was a big let-down from the (to my mind) very straight-forward na…

I'm not sure I follow. Phoenix is also MVC and its request model is far simpler than Rails'. In Rails we have controllers, we have callbacks (or "filters" as they are called now), and we have "middleware". That's three concepts right there! In Phoenix, we have a connection struct that flows through a pipeline of "plugs". Plugs are just functions that transform said connection. Each part of the request pipeline is implemented as a plug. You can create your own plugs and "plug" them in where you see fit. Read more here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/plug.html

Of course, LiveView isn't MVC in the classic sense, but it still uses plugs. Its goal is to simplify the SPA which I'd say it does a particular good job of.

[Edited to fix part of a sentence I deleted by accident]

Re: How we got to LiveView

#39

Post by jherdman »

chrismccord wrote: post #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!

Hi Chris.

We've been using LiveView to build a new app at Precision Nutrition and are largely quite happy with it so far.

One concern we keep coming back to is that of the need for constant connectivity in order for the app to work. I'll throw up the disclaimer here that I've not spike on how to handle network disconnects. That said, we've had a few of our internal users lose their connection to the web socket, and the app just beach balls. You can't do anything. Another example we keep coming back to is a user going onto a subway.

How do you envision spotty connections being handled long term?

Re: How we got to LiveView

#40

Post by tptacek »

mrkurt wrote: post #37
whitepoplar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one wanted to learn LiveView today, what's the best resource to learn? Also, will there be improvements to the LiveView latency story (if it's even possible) when providing a service to a global audience? Thanks for all your work!

Non technical Fly.io founder here: LiveView and Elixir work very well distributed all over the world. Here's an example app I fumbled my way through to show it in action: https://liveview-counter.fly.dev/

"Non-technical Fly.io founder", who do you think you're kidding? You have more commits than me in the last week.
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