Phoenix LiveView Goes 1.0

A metallic balloon in the shape of the number one against a bright yellow background
Brian Cardarella

CEO & Founder

Brian Cardarella

Congratulations to Chris McCord on the release of Phoenix LiveView 1.0!

I’m fortunate to have worked alongside many talented engineers over the years at DockYard, with Chris being at the top of that short list. (Robert Jackson may be tied with Chris) During his time at DockYard the LiveView project was started and began to be used around the world in production. I want to share with you all my recollection of the project’s infancy.

Forged from Anger

While I cannot claim for certain I would like to think that DockYard’s expertise in Ember.js, at the time, played a role in the creation of LiveView. Why? Because building Ember.js app, and frankly any JavaScript SPA, is incredibly expensive both in time and money. I used to joke that with SPAs you can build the same app for twice the time and twice the money. However, the fiscal irresponsibility of introducing convuluted JavaScript applications into organizations is a topic for another time.

While shielding Chris from front-end JavaScript development was an absolute stroke of genius on my part he certainly caught some shrapnel from time to time. This is why I choose to believe that LiveView was born in anger and not love. But, from anger we’ve found love.

I Didn’t Get It, At First

I have to admit that when Chris first showed me LiveView, I didn’t get it. At the time I was (secretly) already exiting DockYard so mentaly I was one foot out the door but I had also been so deep in the SPA land that my mental model on frontend development had a hard time grasping what LiveView actually meant.

Around that time I had, interally, annoucned DockYard’s intention to distance ourselves from the Ember.js project. (and that’s a topic of conversation for many beers) There was concern within the company with what our frontend specialization was going to be. We were very happy with Phoenix on the backend. I saw the order of magnitude in developer productivity benefit that came from writing Elixir compared to any other language I’ve used in my career. So I was looked for that replacement when Chris was buidling it right before my very eyes. Unfortuantely it was too close to my face and I’m too old to read something so close so I spent a ton of money trying to compile Elixir to Web Assembly.

Finally Getting It

I don’t recall exactly when but at some point I took a weekend to play with an early version of LiveView and was struck with how it brought some of the joy of rapidly building web applications back. The festering wound that writing JavaScript for years had inflicted on my soul had slowly begun to heal. I could see colors again and taste flavors. Life was worth living.

What sold me was how easy LiveView made several key issues compared JavaScript frontend development

  • managing application state
  • complexity with server side rendering & application start time
  • no complex compilation pipeline
  • ecosystem stability (admittedly the JS ecosystem is somewhat less volatile than it was back in 2018)

All of these speak directly to development and long-term maintenance costs. It is less expensive to develop identical behavior with LiveView than with any JavaScript framework. Companies can compete at a higher level with smaller teams. And right now the transition that the tech industry is going through LiveView is just the salve we need to apply to the rash of exorbitant costs that is JavaScript application development.-

What 1.0 Means

Considering that in the world of Elixir LiveView has been used for years at this point with great succcess in production environments it can be hard to appreciate the perspective from thoes outside our eco-system. Reaching 1.0 for a major project such as LiveView is what many companies wait for. It conveys a sense of stability and API lockdown. Risk averse organizations that may be great fits for the many benefits of LiveView can now start to take a serious look at migrating to the Elixir stack. Those that do will find themselves able to deliver features faster than their compeition while requiring less resources to scale and maintain their applications.

🎉 Congratulations to Chris and the entire Phoenix Core Team on this major milestone. 🎉

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