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How do these tools work? Are they like ASP.NET Webforms?

The gist I was able to glean, specifically about Pheonix Liveview, is that all updates on the Frontend and Backend are pushed to the other side via websockets. For the Frontend, this means sending some json payload to the Backend. For the Backend this means either responding to a request or sending out a new update both of which involve sending out a snippet of pre-rendered HTML to replace/update an existing element that was already on page.

The benefit here is that we can get to a place that is almost a SPA without needing to do a whole lot of JavaScript for the Frontend. It also helps that Elixir is built on top of Erlang which gives it a boon to be able to handle a lot of users on one server.

There is also a bundle of clever implementation which means the templates are aware of what parts are static and what parts are dynamic. So they can send optimized changes, essentially small diffs, for the dynamic parts as they change. Often this means only sending the values for your text input field, not any of the markup for the field.

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