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Comment by cestith | Hacker News Reader

It's almost like what some of us did 15 years ago, use just enough JS to load things into the DOM fetched from the backend via XMLHttpRequest, is news now. Having a Websocket open to the backend and using a front end that's aware of that instead of using HTTPS seems to be the major difference here. That difference is more about WebSockets existing now than about the choice of backend language or the server-rendered, frontend-refreshed display model.

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We wrote a framework 15 years ago (almost exactly) that took rendered snippets from the servers and plugged them into the DOM; https://flexlists.com is 15 years old and uses that. It's really fast and was far easier to build with than all the manual jquery stuff. Fun times :) I should rewrite it in Liveview, seems a good fit.

The biggest difference (at least for Phoenix LiveView) is having a stateful backend represent the UI and we do away entirely with HTTP APIs/serializers/resolvers. So you get both interaction and push updates from the server at any time, without HTTP glue layers. And it actually scales. So think React's functional-reactive-templates on the server, pushing minimal diffs over the wire better than if you'd carefully written an efficient JSON API or GraphQL endpoint. Elixir is also a distributed programming language so you also get things for free like sending an update to everyone's UI across the entire cluster.

I think you're the only one to mention JSON or serialization at all. I do believe I already said websockets were the innovation, but they really literally did not exist 15 years ago for us to use. Elixir being distributed is nice. You still need the logic to get the change into everyone's session. You're just not using an external DB, cache layer, or work queue to do it.

It's amazing, really, how people feel comfortable condescending to others who explain how we did things before the current technologies existed as if we could never grasp how the new technologies improve things. Yes, this is nice, but it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.

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