

Ask HN: Does anyone use Phoenix Framework in production? - slaxman

Phoenix, a framework for Elixir, seems to be very much like rails. Is anyone using it in production? If so, how has your experience been?
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angersock
So, disclaimer...haven't used it in full anger (i.e., bet my continuing
payment of rent on it), but I think it's got some very good things going for
it based on my hobby project.

First, the community support is awesome--every day that I'm in IRC I can get
useful help from Chris, and that extends even to somewhat noobish mistakes. As
the community grows, and we get more hotshot valley kids who just want a short
exit and they've heard about this crazy Phoenix language, this might go away,
but for now it's a great time to be in.

Second, the plug system is pretty much everything I liked from Express/Connect
middleware. Very easy to setup pipelines and whatnot and setup that sort of
layered functionality. Rails didn't do this in a way that I liked, nor did
Sinatra--it's really something I didn't know I missed until I was doing Node
development.

Third, UTF-8 is a first-class citizen in Elixir. This is something that was
clunky and a little sad in Erlang.

Fourth, Websockets are a first-class citizen in Phoenix. No more of the hacky
bullshit we've dealt with in other libraries (I'm looking at you, Event
Machine).

~

At ElixirConf last year I think a few different companies were looking at
switching over, most notably at least one game studio that wanted to use it on
the backend (I could be misremembering, so don't hold me to that) for
infrastructure stuff.

Personally, I really want to move my company's entire stack over to it barring
some compute jobs, but that's a long road to hoe.

