A little background for this: as much as I love Elixir, I suck at UI design. Not even CSS - I just can’t make a nice UI without my comfy Joy UI components. And I’m sure I’m not the only one
I wanted to get into web dev with Elixir, but the more I looked into it the more it seemed just… extra. I’m just a high schooler making web apps, I don’t need big crazy frameworks with databases. And I’m sure I’m not the only one :)))
So I made Tamnoon - a library (/framework i guess?) to make realtime web apps effortlessly without all the bells and whistles. It’s basically a glorified cowboy websocket server, and it’s pretty much fully extensible, so you can do anything you want with it really.
I aimed to make it as simple as possible and abstract everything away, including the boilerplate - so you can write clean readable code with 0 distractions.
By default it is capable of holding a state for each client (similar to agents) and also implements basic pubsub functionality with channels. (currently no built-in database support since I do not get along with databases )
The guides in the documentation basically cover everything you need to know, so check them out if you’re interested! Tamnoon v0.1.1 — Documentation
I would love to hear if you tried it out, and in general any thoughts / questions about it
Hope you have a great day!
0 setup, 0 boilerplate, 0 complexity. It’s also specifically made for this whereas with phoenix it’s more general purpose, which while it can be very beneficial also means tons of unnecessary boilerplate.
for example, to create a chat app you simply add Tamnoon to your supervision tree like so:
{Tamnoon, [[initial_state: %{last_message: ""}]]}
and that’s literally it for the backend. just have the frontend show new messages as the last_message value changes, and send this json for sending new messages:
{
"method": "pub",
"channel": "clients",
"action": {
"method": "update",
"key": "last_message",
"val": "the new message"
}
}
PS. Sorry if the formatting is bad, I’m just on my phone rn
Took a quick look at your tutorial. Seems to be revolving mostly around in-memory storage with optional shared state for all clients which is OK. Not a super widespread use-case but it’s nice to have some alternatives.
Yeah I’m honestly not a huge fan of dealing with databases, however it shouldn’t be hard to add data storage with ecto (or even just straight up json files)
I am a fan of frameworks with much less files than Phoenix – though indeed it’s hard to argue that Phoenix puts too many files; I’d merge or even eliminate some but it’s true that most are indeed necessary, at least in terms of how Phoenix itself works.
It took me a while to understand what Tamnoon does tbh. I don’t think the comparison to “big crazy frameworks” does you a favor here, as Tamnoon is providing but a tiny sliver of what you’d generally do with those big frameworks.
I really like the idea though. What Tamnoon provides on top of its dependencies is basically CRUD + pubsub of state on the server to clients connected via websockets + extension points for custom actions. This sounds like a great prototyping option when all you care for on the server is that it can hold and manipulate some shared state while working on the frontend.
I might want to look at Bare Websockets | Benjamin Milde, which would allow you to use plug for the websocket portion of tamnoon as well. So Tamnoon could work with both cowboy and bandit as underlying webserver.
Thanks! Yeah that’s basically the gist of it. Originally my concept was just to “imitate” everything I do in React that isn’t inside a React component (so for example api stuff or more complex functions in general).
And I looked at that, and while I don’t know if it would really fit the whole simplicity idea of Tamnoon (and I also don’t think it would necessarily provide that much more functionality that custom methods can’t) it does give me an idea - maybe allowing methods to be “piped” into others would be useful. Like Plug pipelines (but from the json requests instead of the elixir code).
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