@Twfo326 Thanks! Here are the main selling points:
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State on the client - and all of the problems that get solved by this approach (below)…
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No latency issues as most of the code is run immediately on the client. This makes it possible to create rich UI or even games. At the moment with LiveView you need something like fly.io to make it bearable, but you still have latency and can’t guarantee the response time (there is always some variance). And you still need some JS or Alpine to make it work. Until someone manages to create quantum internet (e.g. by taking advantage of entanglement), there are no workarounds for this problem. Not sure if this is even technically possible, though
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Better offline support (internet connection loss, poor signal, etc.). Since most of the code is run on the client and you only hit the server to run some command from time to time, Hologram can work offline most of the time. This would also make it possible to create PWA’s or mobile apps through WebView, assuming you use something like LocalStorage.
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Less server RAM used - state is kept in the browser instead of the socket.
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Less CPU used - most of the code is run by the browser not by the server.
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Less bandwidth used - only commands need to communicate with the server, no need to send diffs to rerender components.
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No state sync problems - state is kept only in one place (browser) and the websocket communication used is stateless.
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No JS or Alpine.js needed except for communication with some third party scripts or widgets, but this can also be solved by creating some standardized libs for popular packages that would handle the interop.
Another important selling point is the dev experience. I envision Hologram to be very friendly to new Elixir converts or beginner devs. I want it to be very, very intuitive, so that you can focus on working on new features in your project instead of solving technical problems and writing boilerplate code.
To achieve that Hologram will provide out of the box such things as UI component library (CSS framework agnostic), authentication, authorization, easy debugging (with time travel), caching, localization and some other features that you typically use in a web app.
I think that using Hologram’s approach, i.e. Elixir-JS transpilation, code on client and action/command architecture it’s possible to create something as productive as Rails, but without its shortcomings related to scalability, efficiency, etc.
