Hey everyone, I’d like to share a project I’ve been working on together wit three other students for one the Universities course ‘Requirements Engineering and Software Startups’.

It is called Artfacer, and it is a search engine that crawls the different graphical art services out there, to inspire visitors.

The reason I am sharing this here, is because it has been built using Elixir and Phoenix. Right now we do use some Postgres (but not much of the Postgres-specific or even SQL-specific stuff, so maybe we might move this to Mnesia at some point, when there is Ecto 2 support for it. For the fuzzy text searching, we use ElasticSearch. (On one hand it feels a bit unfortunate to bring a JVM in here as well. On the other, as far as I know there is no other tool that exists that has the same amount of discoverability of stuff as ElasticSearch has).

But the main important part is of course the Elixir code: The business logic, The crawlers and the web-facing user interface have all been written using Elixir in a nice supervision tree. (Which we want to improve further; crawler errors currently can bring the visitor-facing app down, which is not what we want. Maybe we’ll change it to an umbrella setup. So many possibilities… hooray for proper separation of concerns!)

I will go into a little bit more detail about our stack these next couple of days, and also would love to answer questions.

And all feedback on the site (all of the interface, the usability and our architectural choices) is of course extremely welcome!

https://artfacer.com

~Qqwy/Wiebe-Marten and the others of Team Artfacer