JSON with LiveView

I would go with channels, yes. I don’t know if they are low level (I would say websockets are rather low-level, but not channels), but they are very easy to use, so low level or not they are a great tool if you want to push/stream data from the backend.

Channels could work. Have you considered using BERT instead of JSON? Sending data on the Elixir side would use :erlang.binary_to_term/1, which is fast. Then you could use Bert.js on the front end to decode into JS objects. Although it is admittedly a pretty dependency heavy lib.

BERT do not support maps, as it was created before OTP17 which added maps.

On the other hand I am working (when I find some time) on ERNIE which is “next gen” implementation of BERT.

Ah, hadn’t realized it was so out of date. Love the name.

My main concern is about the features that LiveView is offering besides HTML sync and event passing (which for my use-case aren’t important) but it seems that there are also other important features on top of plain Channels.

Thank you, I’ve considered BERT. But it does not make much sense when you have a heterogenous environment with different technologies.

To me it looks like this library has no dependencies at all (besides the test lib for dev).

https://github.com/ElixiumNetwork/bert-elixir/blob/master/package.json

Hey there.

I actually think it’s an idea with a lot of potential and use-cases that could be supported either in LiveView or as a separate library.

Being able to use whole React ecosystem while keeping the state in sync with your GenServers (or other abstraction) is something that we already experimented with. Take a look at this repo: GitHub - surferseo/livedata_todomvc · GitHub which is a proof of concept for the idea.

While the POC implementation is hideous, the API is really clean and powerful - check out livedata_todomvc/lib/phoenix_livedata_todomvc_web/live_data/todo_state.ex at master · surferseo/livedata_todomvc · GitHub and livedata_todomvc/assets/js/containers/TodoList.js at master · surferseo/livedata_todomvc · GitHub.

If you are interested in hearing more, check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvNy9bh8_vs where I talk a bit about motivations and the ugly internals.

Trying to make it play well with LiveView makes a lot of sense, as it lowers the barrier of entry to integrate it with existing JS codebases.

Cool! I think this is what I had in mind!

Update

@methyl
After watching your screencast. I am sure it’s exactly what I had in mind

This looks is amazing, I would love to help polish LiveData and get it published on hex!

Exactly the kind of middle ground I am looking for - a lower level state abstraction than LiveView, but something a bit higher level than just channels.

I have had the exact mental model of redux <-phoenix-channel-> gen_server - and even made a similar proof of concept that leverages the gen_server state as the source of truth.

The addition of fast-json-patch is a great idea and is what morphdom does but with just the state, genius!

Any progress since the video and the code that you have posted?
If you started breaking it out into a new repo, I would be jumping on to contribute right away!