Phoenix for Rails developers

I’m likely not the best person to respond to this, Ruby & Rails was my first foray into development. I’d been doing Ruby stuff for about 3 years but my first real job as a developer was with Elixir. As much as I love Ruby, the Elixir world felt pretty much the same but everything was demystified. No special magic going on under the hood, if I wanted to know how something worked I could just go to the module/function and find it.

Admittedly, this was most frustrating moving from ActiveRecord to Ecto, I missed all the out of the box magic ActiveRecord provided.

I think https://elixircasts.io/ was a big help when I was first learning Elixir (it still is sometimes). My office also had an older copy of Programming Phoenix I worked through a few chapters of.

I found the ebook with the same name as this thread really useful, but that was also because it was 1.3-specific content close to the release of 1.3:

https://phoenixforrailsdevelopers.com/

I don’t know rails well, but maybe Ecto’s preload is one of the concepts you have to learn when moving to elixir?

Well, you kinda need that on rails too.

Rails’s ActiveRecord will not force you to preload anything, unless you are using the strict_loading setting on your models, but you might risk running in n+1 queries when looping through the results

Ignore any notion you got that “Elixir is Erlang for Rubyists” If you are coming to Elixir from Ruby, wipe this sentiment from your brain. Elixir merely takes the syntactic elements from Ruby that Rubyists love and brings them to Erlang (by which I mean the BEAM, of course)—that’s it. The similarities end there. Seriously. The quicker you accept that the quicker you’ll make progress. At least that’s how it was for me.

In terms of Phoenix, for me it was to accept that Phoenix is nowhere near as opinionated as Rails is. That one actually took me a while. Phoenix is looking a lot less like Rails these days so this isn’t as much of a thing. You can, however, bring the spirit of those concepts over to Phoenix to great effect, however, my second piece of advice here is don’t get frustrated and try and jam specific Rails concepts into Phoenix. Just be uncomfortable for a few weeks and learn why things are the way they are, then you can break the rules if you see fit.

In terms of Ecto, it can be tough at first, but if you ever worked on a Rails project where a bunch of arel or raw SQL was necessary, Ecto will be a breathe of fresh air. I tell my Rails buddies that Ecto is “…like an actually good version of Arel” (sorry Arel devs, but it’s how I feel). I personally don’t miss ActiveRecord even a little.

Not sure I agree with that (or that specific wording) Andrew

If Elixir isn’t the Erlang for Rubyists, which BEAM language is?

I’d agree that Elixir isn’t Ruby on Erlang though, and that it only bears a superficial resemblance (under the hood it’s very much Erlang’s baby) but I do think Elixir helps give Rubyists some familiarity and thus comfort, even if just for the aesthetics. Hence that’s what I think helps make it the closest (production-worthy) Erlang-language we currently have for Ruby users.

I also think that because José and Chris were Rubyists they are giving us what feels like the spiritual successor to Rails - because Phoenix is understandably going to be their version of what they feel is a ‘better’ framework than frameworks that came before it (afaik they were more experienced with Rails than any other web framework).

So for me I see Elixir and Phoenix as the language and framework many Ruby and Rails users might naturally levitate towards… when they begin to reach the same kind of limits or issues José and Chris and many others did while using Ruby and Rails. That’s how I see it anyway, maybe others feel differently

Seems like Rails is looking a lot like Phoenix instead.

I could even say that some JS frameworks are finally “seeing the light” because of Liveview.

Well, when you put it like that it’s hard to argue with!

I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect with my wording and I agree with everything you said. I was trying to word my answer as if speaking to a total Elixir n00b coming from Rails (eg, saying “Erlang” instead of “the BEAM”). When I was learning Elixir, I was under the impression that it was supposed to have a lot more in common with Ruby than just the syntax and it’s a sentiment I’ve heard from others several times over the past few years (mostly from non-Elixirist thinking that “Elixir is basically just Ruby with better concurrency”).

I’ve noticed this too and it’s a good thing.

I recently did a moderately deep dive into Rails 7 due to job opportunities being how they currently are—there is just more Rails stuff out there. Even so, I ended up back with LiveView because it’s so much simpler. Hotwire is really nice if you want to do full progressive enhancement out of the box, though.

Totally agree. I experimented a bit with Phoenix + Hotwire and I really liked it.
To me, Hotwire makes so much more sense to use with Phoenix.Components than it does with Rails views+partials.

Ya, if I ever get back to a certain project was working on I should switch to Phoenix + Hotwire. I was using Hotwire with View Component which is nicer than partials but it’s no heex (and Ruby is no Elixir).