I first heard about Phoenix LiveView in more detail during ElixirConf.EU in @chrismccord’s talk there. Before that, I had heard about it a little bit, but was (a) skeptical about its intended performance, and (b) far too busy with other projects these last two months to look at it in any detail.
But not only did my jaw drop to the floor during Chris’ talk, also did I realize that it was a godsend to use during hackathons where you want to quickly build something simple, without wanting to worry about the ‘frontend ↔ backend communication layer’.
So, last weekend, during the Odyssey Blockchain Hackathon in Groningen, we set out to build a simple PoC ‘mobile-like’ web interface to make people’s energy usage more sustainable by gamifying it.
While we did run into a couple of bugs (it seems that currently nested if/else statements or case-statements in LiveView templates sometimes cause weird behaviour; I’ll investigate further before opening a issue request), the speed improvement gained from not having to worry about the JS boilerplate meant that within ~30 hours, the designer/slicer and I (the single developer on the six-person team) were able to flesh out the complete interactive interface.
Absolutely stunning. 
We will probably release some screen footage and the source code soon, but first let me catch some sleep – I’ve been going on for 56 hours with very little of it. 
