Has anybody used the sugar framework?

Why use it over say, Phoenix?

(I added some info to your post btw)

Phoenix looks nice. I haven’t spent to much time with it. When I worked in ruby I liked to use Sinatra and in python I prefer flask over django. Sugar seems to follow the path of sinatra and flask, so I figured I would play with it first. I wanted to see if anyone else had experience with sugar. I plan to write a test project in both, so I can get a first hand feel for them both.

Phoenix is actually much more like sinatra or flask than rails. It is made up of a few modules based on a pattern called Plugs. The way Plug works is that it creates a datastructure representing the connection, and then it passes that conn through a sequence of functions. Each of those functions are called plugs, because they abide by the Plug interface: they both receive and return a conn.

Phoenix routers are a plug, phoenix controllers are plugs, phoenix endpoints are plugs. It’s all exceptionally simple.

In order to facilitate new users, phoenix.new by default generates a full stack of stuff, but you can use flags to pair it down to just the basics.

Sugar is also based on plug, so both phoenix and sugar operate at the same level of abstraction.

Sugar also strikes me as a bit out of date. It mentions Dynamo in the readme for example, and Dynamo has been dead for over 3 years…

Hello. Sugar Framework contributor here.

I mainly used Sugar when I was creating dead simple APIs and websites and when Phoenix was too heavy to configure/use.

Thanks for the explanation. I am definitely going to spend time with both.

Did anyone spend time with the sugar framework?
I would be interested in experiences had with it.

I am curious not due to any dissatisfaction with phoenix but because I think that a vibrant ecosystem has more than one web framework.

Well phoenix is not really a web framework, it is just a set of plugs that you can optionally use or rip out as you want, in addition to an awesome pubsub and websocket interfaces, also optional.

But yes, more plugs is not bad.

What I would be far more interested in is alternatives to Plug honestly. Elli for example is a fantastic erlang webserver but Plug’s semantics don’t map on to it very well. There have been a few attempts to get Plug to work with Elli and I haven’t seen any of them actually pan out.

Phoenix is basically just a “roll your own framework with these handy plugs” into which people integrate one of the dozens (hundreds?) of plugs available on hex.

I am experimenting with an alternative to plug called raxx. Very much work in progress at the moment but I hope to share more about motivation and progress in the new year

Looks like Elli development moved here: GitHub - elli-lib/elli: Simple, robust and performant Erlang web server · GitHub. I talked to Eric recently and we discussed plugs, Elixir/LFE integrations. So if have ideas or just something please let us know.