Hello guys, I’m really new here in Elixir, my team background is in Ruby on Rails, and we have built our chat solution using Rails backend (with PubNub real-time infrastructure).
We’re looking to switch and plan our tech stack into something more scalable (in term of chat and workflow- like zapier) in the future. Therefore, we are looking to either switch to Golang and Elixir.
Is there any recommendation in terms of the framework? How does the security encryption and all the functionalities worked (online, typing indicator and etc) works in Elixir?
Hope someone experienced can give some direction
Hi and welcome,
As it is an Elixir forum, You might have strong opinion for Elixir, but here are some good/bad parts for Elixir.
- Phoenix is very similar to Rails, and this might be easy to switch
- Elixir syntax is Ruby like
- Elixir really fits chat like application
On the bad part
- Elixir is not Ruby, and the learning curve might be higher, because You need to switch from OOP to Functional programming
- There are probably more packages availale in the Ruby world than in Elixir, although I could replicate my RoR dev to Elixir/Phoenix
Also there is no Active Record, but Ecto… no callbacks, but multies.
What’sApp was built with Erlang, so You see You might have all functionalities available for languages running on the BEAM 
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Hello kokolegorille,
Thank you for your reply, what do you think if we do a microservices for chat in elixir only but still remain our rails backend?
Is this option is something we can do?
Mixing 2 technologies for the sake of productivity might be possible, but in the long term, You should stick to one framework… it adds some complexity when trying to communicate between both applications.
You can have a look at a chat application in Elixir here.
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