I recently wrote a piece of software which is a new kind of a chat system (it’s really revolutionary and I will post something more specific about this in the near future). I used Ruby on Rails and Faye (the Node.js flavor) because I can write anything with this on a lazy afternoon (just to quote my friend and co-founder of our company: “WHAT?! IT’S DONE ALREADY?!”). Then I heard about Elixir and Phoenix. And this duo brings everything to the table that our project demands. It’s crazy fast, it’s unbelievable robust, and it has a whole publish/subscribe system build right the frick in (with JS and iOS clients right there - and an Android client almost ready). And last but not least Elixir truly is a beautiful language (of course I say this since I’m a Ruby fanboy). This all sounded like it was made for our cause. So in the weeks to come I will rewrite the whole thing with this. I know it’s a rather new technology but it just sounds way too good, does it not?
Two things that made me fell in love with Ruby and Rails were Bundler and the community (not in that order). And with Elixir/Phoenix Mix is right there to take Bundler’s place in my heart, and the community is yet small but strongly emerging.
So for one I would like to encourage you to give Elixir/Phoenix a shot so the community gets stronger (and therefore Elixir). And second: what are your experiences with Elixir and Phoenix and switching to this technology (especially from Ruby and Rails)?
And for the people out there who do not know Elixir and Phoenix, yet:
https://medium.com/@kenmazaika/why-im-betting-on-elixir-7c8f847b58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jMbzGv_6tA
Two things I hope to get out of Elixir/Phoenix becoming big are a JetBrains IDE and an out-of-the-box VM on Heroku :-)