We've built many production apps using LiveView. It has some limitations inherent to its design, namely the need to have a semi-reliable WebSocket connection to be able to effectively use the app, but with this tradeoff come a number of advantages:
- code generation makes for an extremely productive experience that makes standing up an actually-useful application very fast
- Elixir is a great language, especially for the web, and using it to render the frontend feels like having the full power of the language plus the simplicity of HTML (with little/no writing JavaScript)
- it's extremely efficient since only tiny changes are sent over the WebSocket when data is updated on the server
- you're already using WebSockets, so adding any kind of real-time functionality is very easy (chat, notifications, game state)
Because of the separation of concerns by convention (i.e. keeping business logic in Contexts), it's also a very viable pathway to build a webapp using LiveView first, and serve an API once you need other types of clients (native apps, API consumers) with minimal changes. Ecto is also great to use for validations, and having that available for "frontend" code is a pleasure. It's also great to be able to have backend
and frontend tests in Elixir.
We've hit some bugs and gotchas over the years leading up to this 1.0 release, but it has long felt like a stable, well-built library that keeps our codebases simple and maintainable, which lets you move fast.
Congratulations to Chris, Jose, and all the other wonderful contributors!