This 1.0 milestone comes six years after the first LiveView commit.
Why LiveView
I started LiveView to scratch an itch. I wanted to create dynamic server-rendered applications without writing JavaScript. I was tired of the inevitable ballooning complexity that it brings.
Think realtime form validations, updating the quantity in a shopping cart, or real-time streaming updates. Why does it require moving mountains to solve in a traditional stack? We write the HTTP glue or GraphQL schemas and resolvers, then we figure out which validation logic needs shared or dup’d. It goes on and on from there – how do we get localization information to the client? What data serializers do we need? How do we wire up WebSockets and IPC back to our code? Is our js bundle getting too large? I guess it’s time to start turning the Webpack or Parcel knobs. Wait Vite is a thing now? Or I guess Bun configuration is what we want? We’ve all felt this pain.
The idea was, what if we removed these problems entirely? HTTP can go away, and the server can handle all the rendering and dynamic update concerns. It felt like a heavy approach, but I knew Elixir and Phoenix was perfectly suited for it.
Six years later this programming model still feels like cheating. Everything is super fast. Payloads are tiny. Latency is best-in-class. Not only do you write less code, there’s simply less to think about when writing features.
Want to shoutout to the Elixir and Phoenix devs, it was so cool to bump the package, run format and all the streamlined Heex changes applied automatically.
Congrats ! It is a joy to use. The whole Phoenix ecosystem and Elixir itself. Five years ago I rewrote an entire system I am responsible for (sole developer) from Erlang to Elixir and expanded it a lot thanks to Phoenix and in particular LiveView.
Arriving here wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the Phoenix team, especially Steffen Deusch, who has tackled countless LiveView issues over the last year.
Thank you! To be clear. the endless revisions mean that someone has been doing a lot of work on behalf of all of us. This is a fabulous accomplishment by the whole Phoenix team, and endless people who have promoted, used, built, and otherwise made this framework flourish.
Congrats, team.
Now, to the basement to work on the first release candidate for Programming Phoenix LiveView.
