This is interesting as Phoenix is making a hell of an effort that you don’t couple yourself to it. Basically the whole idea behind contexts in phoenix, which was introduced in 1.3, is trying to make you not couple your application logic to the web layer (which is essentially what phoenix does). There’s no mention of phoenix anywhere in generated context files. You could remove the whole myapp_web folder and anything left would still work. Put a plain plug based web layer in front and you’ve essentially “switched frameworks”.

@Fl4m3Ph03n1x , for someone so new to the community, you certainly do seem to relish clickbait-y controversies. I would suggest a more irenic approach.

Note that linked talk above was given in 2016, by @lance a longtime community member and also the author of Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix. He’s clearly spent considerable time thinking through these issues.

My own summary answer to your query is
a) no, your application does not need Phoenix, but
b) yes, The Elixir Community does need Phoenix.

Thanks @gregvaughn and @easco for the shoutouts!.

I personally prefer to think of Phoenix as a tool for building web interfaces rather than web applications. I try to avoid the term “Phoenix application” as well because I think it limits how we think about our approach.

In my book, that Greg alluded to, we build a fully functional application without Phoenix. That’s the first two thirds of the book.

Only when we want to make that application available on the web do we layer on a Phoenix interface. We keep the code for those two parts physically separate by means of a poncho project, as much to help the flow of the book as anything. That’s the last third of the book.

My quick response to the question:

You can definitely build a complete application without Phoenix. (I think doing so brings some strong benefits.) If you need for it to have a web interface, though, Phoenix is a fantastic choice.