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This. I can not put my words any better than this. I used to dislike Rails, since it seemed to be too much abstraction that would require time to learn. I now

by sntran 12y ago

This. I can not put my words any better than this. I used to dislike Rails, since it seemed to be too much abstraction that would require time to learn. I now have the same feeling about Phoenix. I could put up a simple web app quickly with Erlang and Cowboy. With Phoenix, I needed to read documents and the source code to figure out what all the imports are doing.

chrismccord 12y ago
I think Phoenix strikes a really great balance with its abstractions. I also think great things happens when a community adopts the same conventions. Rails has shown that beyond anything in my opinion. Things like our project bootstrap command `mix phoenix.new my_app` lets you get a bare app up and running in seconds. With a quick guide on the Router and Controller layer, most folks can get up and running very quickly, but our guides have lagged behind development. It's something we're working hard to improve. Lance has been working hard on full-featured guides and we should have them live very soon.
krick 12y ago
For me it's not even about "time to learn", but the fact that I never can be sure I know how something like this works. Even that little detail about how `resources` automatically defines so many routes… yeah, it's kinda convenient, but I would be more comfortable if I'd have all of my routes explicitly defined somewhere, at least in a framework with scaffolding. When an app written like that grows, and I'm not the only developer, and that guy before me was clearly using drugs — well, that really becomes scary much quicker than in a simple Flask-style framework.
- josevalim 12y ago
  Curiosity: is that a concern only with routes? Or would you also like to have a explicit control of which middleware you are using too? Because if the latter, it feels like a web framework isn't for you. But you should definitely consider Plug (http://github.com/elixir-lang/plug http://github.com/elixir-lang/plug), which has all the pieces and you just need to put them together (a simple router, a bunch of "middleware", etc).
drewolson 12y ago
This whole "framework fatigue" thing is going reductio ad absurdum. Convenience is not bad. _Too_ much convenience traded for opacity is bad. As someone with a Phoenix app running in production, I can tell you that this framework hits the sweet spot of providing lots of value without requiring the user to learn too much. The abstractions it provides, especially the router and rendering layers, are very welcome. And I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has built a few smaller vanilla plug applications. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here just because rails went a little too far with the magic.

by sntran 12y ago

chrismccord 12y ago

I think Phoenix strikes a really great balance with its abstractions. I also think great things happens when a community adopts the same conventions. Rails has shown that beyond anything in my opinion. Things like our project bootstrap command `mix phoenix.new my_app` lets you get a bare app up and running in seconds. With a quick guide on the Router and Controller layer, most folks can get up and running very quickly, but our guides have lagged behind development. It's something we're working hard to improve. Lance has been working hard on full-featured guides and we should have them live very soon.

krick 12y ago

For me it's not even about "time to learn", but the fact that I never can be sure I know how something like this works. Even that little detail about how `resources` automatically defines so many routes… yeah, it's kinda convenient, but I would be more comfortable if I'd have all of my routes explicitly defined somewhere, at least in a framework with scaffolding. When an app written like that grows, and I'm not the only developer, and that guy before me was clearly using drugs — well, that really becomes scary much quicker than in a simple Flask-style framework.

josevalim 12y ago
Curiosity: is that a concern only with routes? Or would you also like to have a explicit control of which middleware you are using too? Because if the latter, it feels like a web framework isn't for you. But you should definitely consider Plug (http://github.com/elixir-lang/plug http://github.com/elixir-lang/plug), which has all the pieces and you just need to put them together (a simple router, a bunch of "middleware", etc).

drewolson 12y ago

This whole "framework fatigue" thing is going reductio ad absurdum. Convenience is not bad. _Too_ much convenience traded for opacity is bad. As someone with a Phoenix app running in production, I can tell you that this framework hits the sweet spot of providing lots of value without requiring the user to learn too much. The abstractions it provides, especially the router and rendering layers, are very welcome. And I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has built a few smaller vanilla plug applications. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here just because rails went a little too far with the magic.