Hello!

I’ve been an avid Phoenix user for years now (let’s say ~4-5 years?). Have multiple installations running in production etc. I also have Ruby on Rails experience a way back (from Rails 4 already if I remember correctly up to Rails 6). Total professional programming experience is ~15 years and has been mostly about web-apps.

Usually when I use these frameworks which do all the things, I start to wonder at one point, how difficult would it be to create a web application using lower level tools instead of these heavy-weight champions. I’m happy to say that I find Phoenix much more lightweight compared to Rails, however it still gets once in a while in my way with weird problems, which are harder to grasp due to the overhead and creates additional work with its backwards-incompatible version releases if there is any urge to upgrade. In Ruby ecosystem I would use Sinatra (or something similar) with some templating engine and lower-level database-connection library to build a web application if I would not want to use Rails.

I’ve never done something similar in Elixir world yet, but started to think what does Phoenix offer me in the first place. As I understand then one big thing about Phoenix is LiveView, but I’ve never found a use for it since I like more “boring technologies” meaning server-side template rendering and only a little bit of JavaScript here and there where more dynamic functionality is needed (surprise, surprise - most of the time it is not needed). And of course Phoenix-like framework offers conventions of where to put your code, which is really good if you’re just starting coding career.

I started to ponder that thought a little bit more and found out that most of the things I thought being part of Phoenix is just part of Elixir itself (thing Config and Releases for example).

After some initial research I found out that I could use Plug with Cowboy, Config, Releases and EEx together with Ecto and its migrations. I would also like not to use Ecto and use something where I can write plain old SQL, but have not found anything to my liking yet in Elixir ecosystem.

Any thoughts or experience about going this road or any strong opinions against doing it? What does Phoenix offer in your mind, which is not easy to do when not using Phoenix? Any good light-weight library suggestions (especially about database related)?

Don’t get me wrong - Phoenix is a fantastic framework, which has managed to create a fork of RoR in a good way. Usually these forks fail miserably in other ecosystems/programming languages because for some reason good parts of RoR is not copied and many bad parts are copied instead Thank you for Phoenix!

Jarmo