I wrote a little app recently to test out live-view. It was my first time really working with it, though I've been writing elixir for years. https://gif.energy
Didn't really have any issues. There were maybe one or two gotchas but they were explained clearly by the docs (appending vs updating elements) and I was able to get it sorted easily. That whole app took a couple days, but more than half the time was wasted on iOS not supporting mp4 and webm formats for the animated shots in the chat messages. Unfortunately, liveview does not fix Apple's stupid walled garden.
Overall it was a great way to minimize the javascript involved. It doesn't make sense for certain types of apps, but it really adds a ton of value and saves a lot of time when the use case is right. And it performs really well. Loading and rendering a chatroom full of messages (with animated gifs in each message) makes a couple requests and happens in less than a second.
And combined with phoenix presence it was like...5 lines of code to add realtime online/offline statuses for users. Super cool.
The common retort from SPA devs is "what about offline?" Since LiveView keeps state on the server, it doesn't really work offline.
However, 1) you can add custom JS using LiveView's hooks, which might be enough for very simple offline behavior and 2) many SPAs don't work offline either.
If offline support is a major part of your app's design, LiveView isn't a good fit. But you could still use Phoenix Channels (the building block underneath LiveView) to provide fast push updates to your client. See the channels docs for an idea of how they work - https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/channels.html
I'm not the person you asked this, but the BEAM (and phoenix by extension) excels in highly parallel contexts.
basically if you got an application which wants to connect everyone to each other in real time, thats a perfect usecase for the BEAM. so chat rooms, live-feeds, comments, video/audio conferencing, etc.
and thats also exactly where phoenix excels in my opinion as a occasional user. (never professionally though)
quick and seamless communication between silly amounts of people with almost negligible amount of resources while being error tolerant to an extreme (functional, so almost no state)
just try it out on a weekend. its definitely worth it just to see how web-development couldve been. you'll probably go back to the old way, because thats just how you earn your money and where you already have your expertise... but its definitely amazing to see how easy it can be
Didn't really have any issues. There were maybe one or two gotchas but they were explained clearly by the docs (appending vs updating elements) and I was able to get it sorted easily. That whole app took a couple days, but more than half the time was wasted on iOS not supporting mp4 and webm formats for the animated shots in the chat messages. Unfortunately, liveview does not fix Apple's stupid walled garden.
Overall it was a great way to minimize the javascript involved. It doesn't make sense for certain types of apps, but it really adds a ton of value and saves a lot of time when the use case is right. And it performs really well. Loading and rendering a chatroom full of messages (with animated gifs in each message) makes a couple requests and happens in less than a second.
And combined with phoenix presence it was like...5 lines of code to add realtime online/offline statuses for users. Super cool.