Chris McCord - Keynote: Phoenix LiveView - Interactive Apps without Javascript - ElixirConf EU 2019

Thank you Chris and the Phoenix team for all your amazing work! I’ve been using LiveView in production since only a few months after the first version was released in 2019 and it’s been fantastic from the very beginning and a joy to develop with :-) For anyone who doesn't remember, this is the keynote at ElixirConf EU in Prague where Chris introduced LiveView to the community: ▶ this video

Have a look at how Phoenix(Elixir) does it with LiveView. You simply write everything as a server rendered view and the framework pulls things apart and sends just what changed over a web socket. Its mind blowing how fast it is (can be. Latency is real) I have no doubt that this style of front-end management is going to be a game changer in the next few years. Of course full-on SPA frameworks will still have their place. But if you aren’t writing the next Google Maps clone, maybe you don’t need all that. It’s made me love web dev again after hating the complexity explosion of recent years. ▶ this video

The round trip is very quick, websocket with a tiny payload in most cases. This video does a great job of discussing the advantages (skip forward to 6:50) ▶ this video

I really like the way that Phoenix Liveview is trying to solve for this, trying to find the sweet spot in the middle of building multipage apps and SPAs. Great talk about it from the developer here ▶ this video

Have a look at Phoenix Live View -> ▶ this video It is still early days, and isn't suitable for every use-case, but it could be the answer you're looking for. Continue to write back-end code only. But with the benefits of quick-response front-end app. I'm a total convert (evangelist) who has been increasingly put off by the evolution (devolution?) of front-end development over the past 5-10 years. This could be one way of the mess.

Python is definitely on an undeniable upswing, but you might find your mind more tingly taking a look at Elixir [0] with Phoenix-LiveView [1]. Here's a video that introduces the framework (April 2019): ▶ this video It's based on Erlang which has always felt a little rough around the edges, but rock solid and very fast. With Erlang, service boundaries become a thing of the past and tangible state makes debugging a breeze. It's still on the upswing after 20 years in industry. Elixir greatly improves Erlang's tooling and creature comforts and adds syntax that many find more enjoyable. As a guy with web dev PTSD, I've been testing Phoenix and Live-View a bit lately and it really hits a sweet spot between Node's speed and evented nature and the simpler end of React's interactivity. And jobs seem to be appearing too. Plus Elixir is surprisingly simple to setup[2] so you won't be spending all night fighting Python module dep issues. :) [0] link [1] link [2] link

Not really, the frontend caches the static parts of the template and the backend only needs to resend the dynamic, changing, parts. So "Welcome to $mysite, $username." would initially send the full rendering but if the data changes it would only send "Hacker News,lawik" over the wire. Somewhat simplified. This covers it quite well: ▶ this video