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by chrismccord 1498 days ago
To tame the snark from the quoted comment, I think it's worth breaking down.

Current SPA trends are about deploying your app separate from the backend, often CDN-style close to the user (because speed of light matters). Most apps at scale use caching for reads on hot-code paths, so now we have "eventual consistency" in the mix.

Elixir is distributed out of the box, so while "global distribution" sounds fanciful, it's literally baked into the Virtual Machine, Fly simply gives us a private ipv6 network across the globe. All Elixir sees is a cluster of hosts that it can connect to, and it's off to the races.

What I'm getting at is all this snark actually describes most application folks build today at any scale, and we build distributed apps with Elixir because it's a distributed platform.

> All of this tech sounds cool, but like the author, I'm unsure when it's called for.

Imagine if you could write your dynamic UI with realtime updates, and you didn't have to bootstrap JSON apis, or GraphQL schemas for it. Imagine doing `PubSub.broadcast(room, "new_message", ...)` and it gets sent globally to all your instances – with no external dependency. Want to show some activity on the page when something happens on the cluster? Broadcast the event, then write 3 lines of code to update your UI. Imagine writing "naive" template code that renders some markup, but what falls out is smaller payloads on the wire than your carefully typed and specified GraphQL schemas that require serialization rules for all your objects. Imagine doing away with all that and gaining all the benefits of payload size.

If that sounds interesting, Phoenix + LiveView would be called for any time you wanted a dynamic UI or realtime updates and bonus points if you care about writing less code and killing layers of abstraction. Fly would be called for for the same reason folks use CDN's today, to serve resources of the app close to the user, except we just serve the app there instead.
1 comments
satyrnein 1497 days ago
It really is pretty cool stuff, and it may not be additional complexity for those who are already at the scale where they're dealing with CDNs and caching hot paths, as you say.

For the long tail of Rails/Django/Laravel apps sitting on Heroku or a pair of EC2s in Virginia, who are looking at SPAs with trepidation, I think the case is less obvious.

Sorry if the snark was excessive and thanks for your reply!

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