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Ask HN: What do you think about Elixir and Phoenix for web/mobile app?

7 points by mrsmee89 ↗ HN
I’m new to elixir and phoenix but right off the bat it seems fantastic and a pleasure to code with. Is there anything that as a beginner might be useful to know? I’d like to use it as a backend for an iOS app in the future. I think particularly love the liveview feature in elixir.

10 comments

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_sevh
Your first impression is the same as mine. Elixir/Phoenix is absolutely fantastic and could likely be the future of web design - as soon as everyone realize that all that Node stuff was a huge mistake. That being said, Elixir is a pretty new language and the user base isn't all that huge. Both being arguments against using Elixir in a real production environment. My point being that if you are looking at acquiring skills for future employment, Elixir may not be the best bet. In that case, Golang or Ruby even, would make more sense.
mrsmee89
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree node is counter intuitive, I’m curious why you think it was a mistake?

Elixir is quite new but Erlang, which it compiles to, is quite seasoned at least in programming years. That gives me confidence in terms of stability. I was able to spin up a basic real-time app in elixir in about an hour. Something that would’ve taken much longer in Django or rails. Never wanted to join an open source team before but I’m strongly considering making myself available to the phoenix team :)

ralmidani
The main problems with Node/NPM/Yarn are the fragmentation and churn. The situation is so bad that Rails and Phoenix are moving to alternative solutions in their latest releases.
vnglst
I think Liveview was designed specifically for the browser, but you could use a web view to use this functionality.
ralmidani
You can build a back-end for an iOS app with whatever you want, although I’m pretty biased toward Elixir/Phoenix.

LiveView is amazing but it seems it is coupled tightly with HTML (for now). Phoenix Channels seems like a great way to build a real-time back-end, and there are Swift clients out there.

mrsmee89
I’m partial to phoenix as well :) it seems so thought out out. Things work exactly as I would expect them o work. A real pleasure. Thanks for the phoenix channels suggestion looks very cool. I wonder if liveview piggybacks off of it.
ralmidani
I haven’t used LiveView yet but I believe it is, indeed, another layer on top of Phoenix Channels.