[mike1o1]

I've been using Elixir for about a year on a side project and I've been enjoying it more than any other backend I've used (Node, Rails and C#). I recently discovered Ash and I feel like after that initial learning curve my productivity (and code quality) has improved quite a bit.

I wish Elixir had more mindshare beside just LiveView and "real time" type functionality. Even building a GraphQL/JSON endpoint without real-time requirements, the functional nature (no side effects), pattern matching and ruby inspired syntax makes writing plain old JSON controllers a joy.

While Elixir might not have a package for every use case under the sun, the low level primitives are there.

[realusername]

Personally while I enjoy Elixir/Phoenix, I didn't like Ash because there's way too many keyword DSL to learn.

It's like Rails except that there's much more resources for Rails to find if you made a mistake in the DSL

[mike1o1]

Yes, the learning curve is a extremely high. It took a few false starts over time, but after the "Ash book" came out, I gave it a more serious try and it finally started to click for me.

I think it helped that at the time I was trying to build some pretty advanced filtering functionality using Ecto and was having a pretty tough time. While searching for solutions I saw a few mentions of Ash and that it could solve the problem out of the box.

After a few days of experiments, I found that it was able to do the filtering I wanted out of the box and was even more functional than what I was trying to build.

For reference, I was trying to add some tagging functionality to a resource and I wanted to be able to filter by that tag, including multiple tags. Can I do that in Ecto? Of course, but Ash provided that out of the box after modeling the resource.

[pmarreck]

So if you're comfortable with Ecto and SQL, you can safely skip over Ash?

[mike1o1]

I guess, but you'll be writing a _lot_ of code yourself, that might be hard to maintain and can become brittle overtime as requirements evolve.

As an example, I wanted to add support for adding tags to a resource, and support filtering for the resource by the tag, and I wanted to be able to do this filtering both through Elixir functions as well as GraphQL.

Can I do this with Ecto? Absolutely, but I'd have to build it all myself.

With Ash, I created a `Tag` and `Tagging` resource, adding a `many_to_many` block on my resource, marked it as public. Then I added the `AshGraphql.Resource` extension to my `Tag` resource, marked it as filterable and I was done.

Now I can filter and sort by tags, filter by where tags _don't_ exist and more. I didn't have to do anything other than model my domain, and Ash took care of the rest for me. Not only that, but it probably did a lot of things for me that I probably wouldn't have thought of, such as supporting multi-tenancy, policies and more.

It really is a lovely tool, I can't say enough good things about it.

Does it have a learning curve? Absolutely! Is it worth overcoming it? Again, absolutely!

[pmarreck]

Ah. Looks like I'll have to get the Ash book...

[going_north]

Chiming in to recommend it too! The policies are really good too, for instance this is one from our code base:

    policy action(:invite_user) do
      forbid_unless actor_attribute_equals(:role, :admin)
      authorize_if {App.Checks.OnlyAllowedRoles, roles: [:student, :parent]}
    end

And what's nice is that these policies apply for both the API and the frontend code without having to do anything extra :)

[borromakot]

That is like 0.5% of what Ash helps with :)

[pmarreck]

Except that it's not like Rails in the sense that in Rails, you will eventually develop extremely difficult to debug race conditions thanks to mutability that Elixir lacks.

Source: Has worked on million-line Ruby on Rails codebase