4 ms·

Elixir and Phoenix are interesting technologies. I have a good friend that changed from Rails to Phoenix and is very happy with it. I stayed in the Rails ecosys

Elixir and Phoenix are interesting technologies. I have a good friend that changed from Rails to Phoenix and is very happy with it. I stayed in the Rails ecosystem and am quite happy too and added Go to my toolbelt when I need something with more concurrency. How is the Elixir ecosystem nowadays? Anyone that is active in both ecosystems (Elixir, Ruby) can compare?

kriro 3y ago
I'm not super active in the ecosystem but Elixir+Phoenix is a true joy, the community is great. The community is also great. Depending on your use case LiveView may or may not be a game changer as well. It's my goto for any hobby projects these days (used to be Django).
cybrox 3y ago
We've been using Elixir + Phoenix in production for about 5 years and I really like the ecosystem. Phoenix has undergone some bigger changes with recent versions due to the Liveview development, which were a bit annoying to keep up with but in general, everything is very stable and well documented. Elixir in general is one of my most beloved ecosystems in terms of develper productivity. - Opinionated, configurable formatter, type annotations and checking, very good test and doc tools, awesome community... It's everything I know from the Ruby + Rails community years ago but dialled up a bit. I haven't done much Ruby work in the last 5 years so I can't provide a direct comparison but I always felt like you really feel the extra 10% of polish Elixir has over Ruby due to the core teams strong involvement in tooling and developer experience. The only even more streamlined experience for in recent times was Flutter (as long as you don't stray too deep into ffi/native code)
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  I think the instructions for upgrading Phoenix are pretty much second to none, I just upgraded everything to support the new components system and it is much better than templates because you can have component level state and encapsulation of pieces of your frontend architecture in a React style. It was a pain though you are right! You can also reuse things between normal and live view pages if you break down your components carefully. I always just look at the number of bugs phoenix has compared to comparable frameworks and it makes me very glad to be using something this stable.
arrowsmith 3y ago
I switched from Rails to Phoenix a few years ago and have never looked back. It solves basically all of the frustrations I had with Rails (see e.g. Peter Solnica's writing [0]) and is truly a joy to work with. If anyone else is thinking of switching from Rails to Phoenix then I humbly recommend my course Phoenix on Rails (http://phoenixonrails.com/ http://phoenixonrails.com/). Sorry for the self-promo, but if you use the code HIT8RUN (valid for the next 48 hours) then you can have a 10% discount. [0] https://solnic.codes/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up/ https://solnic.codes/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up/
brightball 3y ago
Big fan of both Rails and Phoenix. I use both situationally.
sodapopcan 3y ago
One random concrete example I found while playing with Hotwire is that if you need a full PWA, it's much easier than in LiveView. With Hotwire it JustWorks(tm) while with LiveView it's a giant pain as you have to double up events with controller actions (which is terrible). If you don't need this, though, which many don't, LiveView is cognitively easier simpler its DOM-diffing as opposed to Hotwire's frame-targeting mechanism. To be crystal clear, I'm not saying that targeting frames is hard, just that's it's even easier not have to have to do it at all.

kriro 3y ago

I'm not super active in the ecosystem but Elixir+Phoenix is a true joy, the community is great. The community is also great. Depending on your use case LiveView may or may not be a game changer as well. It's my goto for any hobby projects these days (used to be Django).

cybrox 3y ago

We've been using Elixir + Phoenix in production for about 5 years and I really like the ecosystem. Phoenix has undergone some bigger changes with recent versions due to the Liveview development, which were a bit annoying to keep up with but in general, everything is very stable and well documented. Elixir in general is one of my most beloved ecosystems in terms of develper productivity. - Opinionated, configurable formatter, type annotations and checking, very good test and doc tools, awesome community... It's everything I know from the Ruby + Rails community years ago but dialled up a bit. I haven't done much Ruby work in the last 5 years so I can't provide a direct comparison but I always felt like you really feel the extra 10% of polish Elixir has over Ruby due to the core teams strong involvement in tooling and developer experience. The only even more streamlined experience for in recent times was Flutter (as long as you don't stray too deep into ffi/native code)

andy_ppp 3y ago
I think the instructions for upgrading Phoenix are pretty much second to none, I just upgraded everything to support the new components system and it is much better than templates because you can have component level state and encapsulation of pieces of your frontend architecture in a React style. It was a pain though you are right! You can also reuse things between normal and live view pages if you break down your components carefully. I always just look at the number of bugs phoenix has compared to comparable frameworks and it makes me very glad to be using something this stable.

arrowsmith 3y ago

I switched from Rails to Phoenix a few years ago and have never looked back. It solves basically all of the frustrations I had with Rails (see e.g. Peter Solnica's writing [0]) and is truly a joy to work with. If anyone else is thinking of switching from Rails to Phoenix then I humbly recommend my course Phoenix on Rails (http://phoenixonrails.com/ http://phoenixonrails.com/). Sorry for the self-promo, but if you use the code HIT8RUN (valid for the next 48 hours) then you can have a 10% discount. [0] https://solnic.codes/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up/ https://solnic.codes/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up/

brightball 3y ago

Big fan of both Rails and Phoenix. I use both situationally.

sodapopcan 3y ago

One random concrete example I found while playing with Hotwire is that if you need a full PWA, it's much easier than in LiveView. With Hotwire it JustWorks(tm) while with LiveView it's a giant pain as you have to double up events with controller actions (which is terrible). If you don't need this, though, which many don't, LiveView is cognitively easier simpler its DOM-diffing as opposed to Hotwire's frame-targeting mechanism. To be crystal clear, I'm not saying that targeting frames is hard, just that's it's even easier not have to have to do it at all.