Impressive! Also, I enjoyed the demo, especially interactivity and source code.
One question: what are the front end options with Electric? E.g. can I use electric together with some front end framework (React/jQuery/anything)? Or should I stick to writing front end components using electric?
You can use React with Electric if you want, though it is not really necessary because Electric already has fine-grained reactivity and can save you from the usual headaches with server-side React. With that said, people have used Reagent in Electric before. In fact, the Electric Clojure tutorial has a tutorial on Reagent interop[1].
Completely new to Clojurescript or electric DSL so this might be a stupid question (will learn more later). As someone who is not a designer, i tend to pick a framework (eg react) that has many good looking design libraries so that i don't need to style each component. I understand that the demo & examples are meant to show the power and functionalities of this good functional langauge. But the examples are unstyled, plain looking, ugly and seem like will take a lot of work to look good. Since i am not a designer, i just want to plug and play a good looking UI library and focus on business logic. hope i am making sense here.
It would be great if you have something like this for mobile apps. How will it work if your product has both web and mobile apps, do you have a create a separate backend for the mobile apps?
From what I understand, this allows people to arbitrarily decide which portions of their DOM get's run in the client or in the server? Essentially allowing us to make SSR pages with client side code sprinkled in, wherever we want. If so, this seems like a really big deal for Clojure world.
It's been worked on for several years AFAICT. It's only very recently that it got a public release, but it was built specifically for use in Hyperfiddle, the company of Dustin Getz (also the same person who developed Electric Clojure).
I am not sure what is a good way to determine whether something is production ready, but I know its developers have been dogfooding it for a while now. The only real problem I see is lack of other companies adopting it leading to nobody else wanting to try adopting it. The other big problem is that it's hard selling people Clojure either because it is a niche language or the parentheses scares people away.*
* Note I use Clojure in my day job. I do not think either of these two points are a valid excuse to not use Clojure, but they are the most common excuses I see.
electric has been a team effort, developed primarily by Geoffrey, Peter and especially Leo of https://github.com/leonoel/missionary who is the lead developer.
the thing predating Electric is in prod at a series B startup, a series A startup is going live with a prod support app in a few weeks, and a seed stage startup is planning a rewrite of a consumer facing productivity tool onto electric after serious evaluation. Plus many serious POCs i’ve seen maybe 2-3 dozen repos this summer. (we only see them when they have a question)
- Is this a lot of bandwidth when done over websockets? I was looking at the starter todo list on your github and everytime I type something a character into the todo list, I have what looks like 3kb of messages in the websocket passed.
- Is there anyway to get this working with multiple nodes? It seems like the way to use it is to bind it to a dynamic var that's only available in the library (`hyperfiddle.electric-dom2/node`)
you mean like multiple tiers, e/client e/server e/service1 e/service2? sure, we probably get to it next year unless a customer implementation needs it sooner
wire protocol is in verbose mode, we have a binary mode as well. it’s also not optimized at all because users already report tangible performance as “incredible” “unbelievable” as compared to the status quo graphql or http RPC or whatever. remember, http transport pays a TCP round trip just to syn/ack the connection before any app payload is sent! Electric wire traffic is also differential, i.e. collections are never sent twice only what changed.
Thanks for responding. You're operating at a high level and I'm an average coder, but I'm trying to understand
It sounds like you're saying Websockets have an advantage as an open connection. It's great that everything is differential, but I'm wondering what exactly is being sent when I type into a `dom/input`? If I write 1000 characters, that's 3mb downloaded. That seems like a lot for typing into an input. What is being diffed here if none of this state is going to anyone but me?
I'm sure it's early days in terms of documenting this for the layman, but I hope some day there's a guide that's easy to digest so I know how I could use it myself.
the DAG overhead is constant not linear, the overhead is mostly the protocol in verbose mode not binary (the difference is large), and as I said we have done no optimization at all (just naively sync entire DAG replicas on both peers requiring far more traffic than actually required) because tangible performance is excellent so far. 1080p youtube is 1MB/s for comparison and our phones have no problem with that. Framing performance as a compiler optimization problem opens the door to using all of compiler and graph theory to super-optimize this
But websockets are quite expensive and requires huge server resources, aren’t they? Notably, lemmy instances can barely handle 1000s of people even when it is written in Rust because they (dumbly) decided to use websockets, when a forum absolutely doesn’t need it, and is more than fine with only approximately real-time data.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim anything general with this, of course WebSockets have their uses and I’m sure Electric Clojure uses them more responsibly, it really is more of a question on what do you think of it. Elixir also has WebSocket solutions, so it seems to be a more common solution nowadays.
we'll have seamless reconnect soon, which means the ws connections can actually drop when inactive (no heartbeats!) and then reconnect when the client wants something, so the forum use case should be quite fine. Not everything needs to be realtime server push, so refactor your code so that queries run on page nav or something. Electric is network transparent but that doesn't mean the network is opaque, the reactivity graph is in userland control (as declared by your AST) and the network data flow is implied by that same AST, same reactivity graph!
One big advantage of React over templating languages is ability to use regular JS functions for loops and conditions. What would happen if regular `map` is used instead of `e/for` in this example: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/user.demo-chat!Chat ?
clojure.core/map is not incremental so you’d lose the performance benefit of reactivity at that call. Note React is not fine grain reactive and will over-compute loops; electric does not have that problem. also, e/for is just reactive map, we chose the for-comprehension syntax over lambda syntax because it lays out your UI code properly without making you feel like you’re programming with collections but it’s just sugar over incremental map. We could have shadowed clojure.core/map with reactive map, which would imply similarly shadowing clojure lambda with electric lambda, but we also highly value clojure/script interoperability, so anything we change in a way that isn’t 99% backwards compatible needs to get a new name. ergo, e/for. also note it’s really e/for-by (and e/map-by) because, like React, you need an extra “react key” parameter (they put it in a different place but the net effect is the same).
Completely new to Clojurescript or electric DSL so this might be a stupid question (will learn more later).It would be great if you have something like this for mobile apps. How will it work if your product has both web and mobile apps, do you have a create a separate backend for the mobile apps?
I've seen someone using a mobile webview with Electric, in this case its up to you if you share mobile and web backends or not. Electric can't tell the difference. Native mobile client is possible but not a priority (ClojureDart might be the best vector?)