Hello there,
what is the best practice for using channels when navigating across pages in a phoenix application?
If channel connection code is put in a layout template, the channel connection is initiated on every page load. Is there a significant performance penalty? Would it be better to implement a single page app style (possibly turbo links), in order to keep a constant connection. I don’t want to use something that is not universally well supported (like web works). Would just like to know how things are done in the Phoenix world. Any help appreciated, thanks.
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If you’re not doing a single-page app, there isn’t really an alternative to re-initiating the socket after each page load.
I think the answer to your question really depends on your use-case: If you want to build something that will eventually have offline-capabilities, a SPA seems like the way to go (if you want to avoid using workers). If you are building an application that always requires an internet connection, re-opening the socket shouldn’t be too much of an overhead.
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Eh, I’ve been using unpoly.js (I hope that is the right url) to swap the pages bodies without restarting connections and such, it makes it ‘feel’ a lot faster (plus significantly less network requests), just need to use the same layout for the <head/> on all your pages, which I do, so it works wonderfully.
So no SPA, very little javascript, just decorate tags well enough so things stay connected properly, but its almost SPA speed, just server-driven (combined with the Elixir Drab library it really is server-driven).
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whoa! nice one
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