[dustinfarris]

I'm 10-years Python/Django and making the leap to Phoenix. I can't begin to describe how thrilled I am with the intelligence and warmth of this community—something I always treasured at Django and was afraid of losing.

Phoenix 1.2 looks ready for prime-time! I just finished setting up a continuous integration/deployment pipeline with edeliver and CircleCI and couldn't be happier with how everything is fitting together.

Very excited for the bright future of Phoenix!

[rattray]

Thanks for sharing!

What are the biggest pros/cons you've encountered so far? What do you miss from Django? What do you wish Django could copy from Phoenix?

[dustinfarris]

I'm still learning, but I've already noticed some incredible response times. Phoenix is very fast. I wish I had actual numbers to give you that compare to Django but I'm just not that far along yet.

Elixir as a language is very nice. This is my first taste of "functional" programming and I really like it. Shifting my mindset from object-oriented has been difficult, but I find the code I write much more straight-forward so far for the types of apps I will be building.

What do I miss? Maturity. Django dotted its Is and crossed its Ts a long time ago. I wouldn't say Phoenix is buggy at all—I think it is production ready—but the recent work Django has been doing with things like Postgres libraries are several steps ahead of where Phoenix is at today. Also, Django documentation is bar-none.

There is nothing about Phoenix that jumps out at me and says "Django would be so much better if it had this!" Maybe Presence will be one of those things, but I have not had a chance to play with it yet. I am excited about how Elixir (on top of Erlang OTP) scales horizontally with virtually no effort, which is something that Python cannot replicate as easily without a lot of thought and some sort of bolted on message db—and in the end, slower. The robust concurrency story (and what that could mean long-term) is exciting to me.

[MartinMond]

I found Ecto to be one of the best Postgres libraries out there.

What do you miss from Django's Postgres libraries in Phoenix/Ecto?

[jerelunruh]

Another Django -> Phoenix dev here. Currently I miss Django's model field types (UrlField, EmailField, etc) and will probably write them if no one else does soon. I sometimes miss South style migrations when I'm prototyping but doubt there's a good reason to implement them in Phoenix. For building JSON APIs JA Serializer is a quite capable alternative to DRF-JA.

For the Django Admin there's ex_admin which I haven't used yet but it appears to take a bit more work than the Django Admin does.

I haven't felt like virtualenv + pip was too bad for deps and deployment but exrm is already comparable/easier with an even better `mix release` planned for this summer/fall. No uwsgi or gunicorn to configure and even nginx can be skipped.

For the last part of your question: the biggest thing missing from Django was a good way to do websockets. Django has channels now but I doubt they'll work like Phoenix/OTP/Erlang (especially in the concurrency and fault tolerance categories).

[cwisecarver]

Is it common to skip nginx or insert-your-reverse-proxy-of-choice-here?

I'm working on a Phoenix app, getting close to being ready for a beta deployment, and I was just looking for best practices as far as putting it in production.

[jerelunruh]

From what I've read (I'm not an expert either) nginx is completely optional. Cowboy (used by Phoenix) supports https termination and I understand that it's the router for Heroku so it sees plenty of traffic.

[sherjilozair]

+1 to rattray's questions. Some more questions: do you think Django is showing its age? Should new web projects be started in new frameworks like Phoenix, or is Django still good to go?

[dustinfarris]

Answered rattray's question.

I think Django is showing its age, but not in a bad way, in a mature way. I truly admire the way Django and its core team have matured. They have been role-models for me for years and still are.

Django's momentum is only getting greater. Mozilla has been dumping money into it recently, and important projects like Django REST Framework are getting funded as well. Django is level-headed and forward-facing. I can't emphasize the importance of those two characteristics enough. Look no further than projects like Andrew Godwin's django-channels for evidence. I think starting a new project in Django absolutely sets you up for success.

That being said, Phoenix is terrific so far. It's fast, fun, and the Erlang/OTP concurrency story is really exciting! I'm lucky to be at a place where I can take a few months to really explore it; and I'm loving it! I will choose Phoenix for my future projects, but not because Django is losing any steam.

[quaunaut]

It's been awhile since I've used Django, but I work with those who use it frequently. Django certainly shouldn't be put out to pasture- but you'd be surprised just how robust and production-ready Phoenix is.

Of course, no one can tell you whether it's good for your particular business case- but Erlang is battle-tested, and Elixir/Phoenix have made it both easy to reason about and perfect for being productive. If one had the option of choosing a framework right now, I don't know of many reasons to not use Phoenix.

[rattray]

> I don't know of many reasons to not use Phoenix.

Personally my biggest reservation would be the difficulty of debugging production issues that span two languages - Elixir and Erlang – when I have no familiarity with the underlying language (and when that language is not widely used, and therefore likely to be sparse on StackOverflow).

That's not to say I wouldn't use Phoenix; it's just that that's the biggest drawback I can think of (aside from general ecosystem maturity, which it sounds like is on an impressive clip).

EDIT: Oh, and Elixir doesn't have support for static type analysis (though it does have typespecs[0], and there is Erlang's dialyzer[2]...). Python has mypy[1], and JavaScript has TypeScript/Flow.

[0] http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavio...

[1] http://mypy-lang.org/

[2] http://erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html

[quaunaut]

In the year or so I've been working with Elixir, I've not had to learn a lick of Erlang besides a couple of function calls I can get at directly from Elixir.

Nor have I heard of anyone else having that issue. It's one of the reasons I enjoy it so much- I get all the performance with none of the complexity.

[jdimov10]

Same here. There's only one minor thing that bugs me a bit - Phoenix seems laid out more similar to RoR than to Django, so took me a bit of getting used to. This is not a criticism by any means. Overall, I'm really thrilled with Phoenix (and Elixir).