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This was great to read and it inspired me to give both a try soon. Question: Did the app receive millions of visitors or was it basically 1 visitor with millio

This was great to read and it inspired me to give both a try soon. Question: Did the app receive millions of visitors or was it basically 1 visitor with millions of viewers via the television showing a recorded screen? At first I thought Phoenix was used because of scaling reasons but now I'm not so sure. Either way, nice work and thanks for the write up!

sotojuan 10y ago
In my experience, Phoenix is used because a) it's easy to get started with b) isn't a monolith like Rails (e.g. Phoenix could be one part of your complete application) but it has good conventions and c) it leverages the Erlang VM's performance and concurrency through Elixir. I know HN gets a lot of hype for X new tech every month, but I'm really liking Phoenix. Ignore the "Phoenix is the future/saved our lives/best thing ever!!" Medium posts and try it out. It's actually pretty good.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I'm enjoying working with phoenix, but when comparing it with Rails, it would be fair to say "it's basically rails" and add a few footnotes about the differences. People who started after Rails was released don't see it because they haven't seen how it was done before. But it's incredible how many conventions DHH created with rails that have since entered the basic repertoire of all web frameworks: migrations, its take on MVC, :belongs_to, the router DSL, the asset pipeline, generators – while you can probably find prior art for all of them somewhere, it's the implementation in Rails that, 10 years later, is still the blueprint for new frameworks. Rails was also the best teaching tool ever invented in the space. Code quality was atrocious, people were reinventing "clever" solutions for every project, testing was probably rare (I never saw it, but it must have been around, right?) I distinctly remember a templating system that turn .xls into a perl script that would write php. If you changed projects, you'd usually be greeted by a directory tree 8 levels deep with the main config.php in /[..]/tmp-2008_b, along with config.inc, main.html.php.old and construction.gif~2. (Not that Phoenix doesn't add lots of refinements that make it a pleasure to use)
  - kinofcain 10y ago
    I'd add that Rails was also hugely influential in its focus on developer productivity. A lot of it was magic and incredibly difficult to debug or modify when it went wrong, but it raised the bar for how you market a framework to developers.
    - brightball 10y ago
      Yep. The Dev productivity area is where Rails really set the bar high. All the other "win the benchmark" stuff that everybody goes to to try to dethrone it is a fair example of people missing the point. :)
- brightball 10y ago
  Fwiw, I'm writing a Phoenix is the Future post at the moment that I hope to publish in the next month. :) Might have to revise the title.

sotojuan 10y ago

In my experience, Phoenix is used because a) it's easy to get started with b) isn't a monolith like Rails (e.g. Phoenix could be one part of your complete application) but it has good conventions and c) it leverages the Erlang VM's performance and concurrency through Elixir. I know HN gets a lot of hype for X new tech every month, but I'm really liking Phoenix. Ignore the "Phoenix is the future/saved our lives/best thing ever!!" Medium posts and try it out. It's actually pretty good.

matt4077 10y ago
I'm enjoying working with phoenix, but when comparing it with Rails, it would be fair to say "it's basically rails" and add a few footnotes about the differences. People who started after Rails was released don't see it because they haven't seen how it was done before. But it's incredible how many conventions DHH created with rails that have since entered the basic repertoire of all web frameworks: migrations, its take on MVC, :belongs_to, the router DSL, the asset pipeline, generators – while you can probably find prior art for all of them somewhere, it's the implementation in Rails that, 10 years later, is still the blueprint for new frameworks. Rails was also the best teaching tool ever invented in the space. Code quality was atrocious, people were reinventing "clever" solutions for every project, testing was probably rare (I never saw it, but it must have been around, right?) I distinctly remember a templating system that turn .xls into a perl script that would write php. If you changed projects, you'd usually be greeted by a directory tree 8 levels deep with the main config.php in /[..]/tmp-2008_b, along with config.inc, main.html.php.old and construction.gif~2. (Not that Phoenix doesn't add lots of refinements that make it a pleasure to use)
- kinofcain 10y ago
  I'd add that Rails was also hugely influential in its focus on developer productivity. A lot of it was magic and incredibly difficult to debug or modify when it went wrong, but it raised the bar for how you market a framework to developers.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Yep. The Dev productivity area is where Rails really set the bar high. All the other "win the benchmark" stuff that everybody goes to to try to dethrone it is a fair example of people missing the point. :)
brightball 10y ago
Fwiw, I'm writing a Phoenix is the Future post at the moment that I hope to publish in the next month. :) Might have to revise the title.