Description
NOTE! This version of the LiveView content is under development. We’re starting by updating all of the videos. Then, we’ll update the written content and links. The updates will tentatively be compldted by Feb 1, 2021.
Phoenix is the web development framework for Elixir, and LiveView is a Phoenix service that allows interactive page flows without JavaScript.
The LiveView project has swept through the Elixir community like wildfire. It takes traditional web development, which focuses on individual tasks that render HTML, and flips the model on its head. Instead, LiveView lets a programmer build a data structure in memory. Then, the user renders the data as a string, and any changes to the data structure automatically trigger a render.
The end result is that the developer’s focus shifts from things that are difficult, like managing concurrency or IO, to something that programmers are good at, writing small functions to change state.
History
When Chris McCord - creator of Phoenix - moved from a Ruby consultancy to the Elixir community, he was looking for the kind of infrastructure that would let something like LiveView flourish. He wrote a book called Metaprogramming Elixir, and then shifted his attention to the Phoenix framework. After years of building effective infrastructure with startling scalability and reliability, he was finally ready to attack LiveView.
The project was unveiled at ElixirConf in 2019, and released in 2020 as a part of Phoenix 1.5. It has been an opensource project from the very beginning, and is rapidly gaining notariety in many programming communities. The very website you’re working on now is built in LiveView, with only four tiny custom JavaScript functions for analytics and payment processing.