Some quotes from Programming Phoenix that inspire
In July 2015, we (Chris McCord) compared Phoenix with Ruby on Rails. The firebird was nearly an order of magnitude faster than the locomotive, and it used just over one fourth of the processing power and just under one sixth of the total memory. Those numbers are staggering, but not many Rails users are after naked power.
In Phoenix, you won’t have to read through dozens of skipbeforefilter commands to know how your code works. You’ll just build a pipeline for each group of routes that work the same way.
One continuous problem with web frameworks is that they tend to bloat over time, sometimes fatally. If the underlying abstractions for extending the framework are wrong, each new feature will increase complexity until the framework collapses under its own weight. Sometimes, the problem is that the web framework doesn’t include enough, and the abstractions for extending the framework aren’t right. This problem is particularly acute with object-oriented languages. Inheritance is simply not a rich enough abstraction to represent the entire ecosystem of a web platform. Inheritance works best when a single feature extends a framework across a single dimension. Unfortunately, many ambitious features span several different dimensions.
As a developer, until now, you’ve been forced to make a choice between applications that intentionally forget important details to scale and applications that try to remember too much and break under load.
Phoenix has: isolation and concurrency. Isolation guarantees that if a bug affects one channel, all other channels continue running. Breaking one feature won’t bleed into other site functionality. Concurrency means one channel can never block another one, whether code is waiting on the database or crunching data. This key advantage means that the UI never becomes unresponsive because the user started a heavy action.
The problem for Rails developers is that the scope of problems it’s best able to solve is rapidly narrowing.
If you’re a Java developer looking for where to go next, or a JVM-language developer looking for a better concurrency story, Phoenix would mean leaving the JVM behind. Maybe that’s a good thing. You’ll find a unified, integrated story in Phoenix with sound abstractions on top. You’ll see a syntax that provides Clojure-style metaprogramming on syntax that we think is richer and cleaner than Scala’s.
A web server is a natural problem for a functional language to solve.
In Phoenix, that connection is the whole universe of things we need to know about a user’s request.
We process data in the model; we read or write that data through the controller. Ecto allows us to organize our code in this way. It separates the code with side effects, which changes the world around us, from the code that’s only transforming data.
the atom table isn’t garbage-collected.
Your application is a series of plugs, beginning with an endpoint and ending with a controller
mix ecto.gen.migration create_user