Changelog

As a reminder, LiveView is an in-development feature of the Phoenix web framework that helps you create rich, interactive experiences while writing very little (ostensibly, zero) JavaScript. In Chris’ words: Phoenix LiveView is an exciting new library which enables rich, real-time user experiences with server-rendered HTML. LiveView powered applications are stateful on the server with bidrectional communication via WebSockets, offering a vastly simplified programming model compared to JavaScript alternatives. In the linked post, Chris shows a lot of examples of LiveView in action, demonstrating what it’s capable of. Here’s a feature-complete snake game, in 330 LOC, which requires zero user-land JavaScript. Impressive!

This release ships with exciting new features, most notably HTTP2 support, improved development experience with faster compile times, new error pages, and local SSL certificate generation. I’m excited to upgrade us so we can get up and running on H2! 💪

Darin Wilson: In his keynote at ElixirConf last week, Chris McCord announced a new feature for the Phoenix web framework that caused many jaws to hit the floor, and had the hall buzzing when the talk was over. The new feature, tentatively called “LiveView”, allows developers to add dynamic, client-side interactions to web pages, using code that runs in Elixir on the server. What exactly is a LiveView, though? We don’t really know yet as this is an ongoing project and no code has been released yet. But as near as I can tell, a LiveView is lot like a React component running in a GenServer – it even has a render function! And with the EEx sigil (which I didn’t know was a thing) the code feels a lot like JSX I am unreasonably excited to see what becomes of this. 

Yesterday, Griffin Byatt hit me up in Slack and let me know we had a few security holes. 😱 After a quick discussion about the magnitude of said holes, he informed me that he’d found them by running our code through his static analysis tool, Sobelow. Say what? For security researchers, it is a useful tool for getting a quick view of points-of-interest. For project maintainers, it can be used to prevent the introduction of a number of common vulnerabilities. I asked Griffin if he’d be kind enough to open a PR with the fixes so we can link it up and use it to show folks how handy this tool is. So that’s what he did and that’s what I’m doing! 💚

The W3C is standardizing the Server-Timing API, which means it’ll be getting easier and easier to push server-side metrics in to our dev tools. Ole Michaelis takes us through plugging (pun intended) it all together with Phoenix. It’s almost too easy!

Zack Kayser built a Texas Hold ‘Em app with the EEP (?) stack and wrote up his findings. He calls Elm and Elixir “a match made in Functional Heaven”, but the endeavor wasn’t without its challenges: I personally struggled with 1) how to organize my code, especially with larger modules, 2) figuring out how to make the UI more interactive, and 3) sharing code across modules. There’s a lot to learn from Zack’s experience. Both the Elm front-end and Phoenix back-end are open source. ✊

Chris McCord with a great round-up of advancements to the popular Elixir web framework. Highlights include H2 support, faster dev compilation, and a harder/better/faster/stronger JSON encoding library.