[fchopin]

What I use Rails for these days is (1) as a backend to our SPAs, so ActiveRecord, Rails controllers, and a view to serve JS assets and CSS via the Asset Pipeline, and (2) to serve Active Admin.

I see there is Ecto, Brunch, and ExAdmin for Phoenix, to cover our primary bases I spoke of, in Elixir/Phoenix.

For those that have switched to Phoenix, and have experience with these three- was it as smooth transition? What are the significant gaps, if any?

[RobertKerans]

A Devise equivalent. There are a number of alternatives, but I've found them all a little raw: with many Rails projects, I know I can just add Devise, and be confident it'll Just Work with minimal work. Valim said he wasn't interested in building a Devise equivalent for Phoenix - I think the reasoning was that each context is different enough in its own way that a monolithic one-size-fits-all solution like Devise isn't preferable, which is fair enough. But authentication is a pain, and carefully wiring up slightly immature solutions is a little hairy.

I've found this only really applies to CRUD-like, Rails-like projects, so about half of the projects I've built, so YMMV: it's maybe just me making the jump from Rails and expecting things to be more similar than they are.

Ecto is good; it's not quite an ORM, so there were a few WTFs when I tried to do things the same way, but on balance I prefer the Ecto approach; a Linq-like query language I like better than a [somewhat magic] ORM, the way it seperates concerns is good, and (in common with most of Phoenix) the way it works is pretty transparent. Not quite mature yet, though Ecto 2 seems to cover most of the functionality I found to be missing in 1.x.

I work primarily front-end,and I always had issues with the asset pipeline. I've found Brunch to be fantastic - there are always going to be a few issues when dealing with NPM, but other than that, I think they picked the absolute simplest JS-based task runner, and having direct access to the JS ecosystem is great. Brunch has been almost zero-config for me, has Just Worked with only a few `rm -rf node_modules`