[im_down_w_otp]

I don't think the point of Phoenix is to be like Rails. It always struck me as being aligned more toward something like Sinatra. ?

One thing Elixir definitely needs is a killer app or framework that really plays to the strengths of its Erlang underpinnings. A web framework is probably not that app/framework.

Those already exist with extreme maturity in other ecosystems. Scaling the web framework part is pretty easy since, unless you royally screwed up your design, you should be able to just add more stateless web heads to service more requests and you almost always should end up ultimately bottlenecked at the persistence layer, not in the request router/processor.

I just don't know what that killer app/framework will be.

[djur]

Phoenix is much closer to Rails in terms of its goals than it is to Sinatra. It's a full-featured framework with asset handling, a recommended file layout, template discovery and compilation, generators, etc.

As far as I can tell, most projects one might use Sinatra for are done in Elixir by just working with Plug directly (Plug being the Elixir analogue to Ruby's Rack). I'm sure there are many lightweight web frameworks for Elixir out there, but I haven't seen any with Sinatra's level of ubiquity.