That’s so awesome to hear about your great experience with Laravel. I’m not familiar with it at all outside of liking several companies that (I think) use it since they work with PHP.

I was going to say what @cmo mentioned in regards to your first note:

Oban is amazing for this, and you could very easily build a simpler version in Elixir (super fast depending on your requirements), but I use Oban for Metamorphic and I think you’ll be super pleased with it as well.

I’m not sure you’ll find as comprehensive an all-in-one-system or “one-stop-shop” (at least, not yet — there are definitely best practices and recommended approaches ). But, for broadcasting, you’ve got an incredible experience on your hands with Phoenix PubSub and LiveView (now 0.17+).

I’d say it’d be pretty easy to build out notifications in your application in LiveView with PubSub and have a super slick “real-time” distributed experience.

I’d recommend watching both Jose Valim’s Elixir 1.13 Elixir Conference video and Chris McCord’s The Future of Full-stack. That will give you a good idea of what people are currently excited about and how ridiculously powerful, and easy-to-use, the Elixir/Phoenix stack is.

For my case, I came to Elixir with very little programming experience, but a vision I believed in, and in no time at all I’ve been able to make my vision a reality. And I found Elixir/Phoenix because I realized that what I wanted to do was way too difficult (if not impossible) for me to achieve with my resources and time in other languages.

Continuing in this vein, for me, the orientation from object-oriented programming to functional programming was the steepest learning curve. But after taking ~17 minutes to follow along with Chris McCord’s demo vlog, I realized that I had found the language and stack that would be my best shot at realizing my dream (even if I didn’t understand any of it).

As a veteran in Laravel/PHP, you will probably find the switch much easier than I did, perhaps immutability/pattern-matching will be odd at first, and I think you’ll quickly grow to love Elixir/Phoenix (even if you still love and decide to keep working with Laravel/PHP).

My experience with Elixir vs other languages (albeit limited) has been this:

Other languages
if you’re doing everything that has been pre-laid out for you, it’s a pretty nice experience. When you start to venture into custom territory it gets less and less pleasant the further along you go.

Elixir/Phoenix
If you’re doing everything that has been pre-laid out for you, it’s a great experience. When you start to venture into custom territory, it gets better and better as you discover how empowered you’ve become.

G’day

For background jobs there is the postgres backed Oban library, which is rather popular. There are others too.

Mailer is now included with the Phoenix generators. See phx.gen.notifier.

Thanks so much for these details. I will take a look at those resources.

I also agree that the OO → functional change is so massive. I was thinking about framework features and had completely forgotten about that shift… It’s quite the change.