I have just watched Jose’s recent presentation on Livebook 0.5.
It seems like a promising platform to develop real-time collaborative applications.
My question is whether I could assume that Livebook would be promising for developing an application that is heavily based on React, or whether this is not the aim at all, but rather at most to have small javascript components to provide some small interactivity on otherwise Elixir based components.
I hope my question is clear and thank you in advance for any contribution you can provide!
I don’t want to speak for Jose, but my sense is that Livebook in no way is aiming to be a substitute for React.
To some extent, I wonder if you are confusing LiveView and LiveBook? LiveView is a framework on top of Phoenix for building realtime interactive pages in Phoenix, driven from the server. This is (vaguely) comparable to React in that it allows for user interactions that aren’t based requesting entire pages from the server.
LiveBook is built with LiveView, and is allows Elixir developers to create “notebook” style pages. This isn’t really the same sort of thing as React at all, it’s more like Jupyter.
I am aware of the differences between LiveView and LiveBook.
I do agree that LiveBook is like Jupyter. Just in view of the demo by Jose who built a chat application within LiveBook, I checked the Kino module and I noticed Kino.JS. Then it crossed my mind whether the purpose of Kino.JS would have been to empower LiveBook in ways that would allow so powerful web application development as by including React. I tend to agree with you that probably this is not the aim, just I wanted to hear other people’s opinion or experiences.
I also think livebook should support JS execution and natively not through a Kino plugin, this is because its vital in most cases for any application build. Even the purest of pure builds contain some JS and this kinda support would enable these developers to write their docs in a consolidated location. Right now you must run Livebook and Jupiter to attain this level of documentation for the build.
Also to answer the question about what framework of JS it should support JS vanilla and let you pull in libs/ frameworks as livebook does with elixir. i.e framework agnostic.
