Tamnoon - Realtime web apps with any frontend and 0 effort :)

Looks like building http servers has become a hobby of many lately.

Can you highlight how your solution is in any way better/easier that using Plug + Phoenix Channels?

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.

Thanks

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.

There is a much bigger thread on this topic which is also IMO very relevant to your framework, here: https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/a-simpler-web-framework-without-plug-phoenix/62885

Ooh thanks, I actually took some inspiration from that framework I’ll add a little comment there

And yeah I agree about Phoenix - it makes it even more complicated imo, as you actually need to know what each file is for and everything.

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).