Changelog

This release ships with exciting new features, most notably HTTP2 support, improved development experience with faster compile times, new error pages, and local SSL certificate generation. I’m excited to upgrade us so we can get up and running on H2! 💪

Finally, an article that breaks Betteridge’s law of headlines! Elixir is known for being a language made for building distributed applications that scale, are massively concurrent, and have self-healing properties. All of these adjectives paint Elixir in a grandiose light. And for good reasons! But is Elixir also a language that can be used for the more mundane tasks of this world like scripting? I think the answer is a definite yes. I’ve been writing Elixir for a few years now, but when it comes time to script something I still reach for Ruby. Case in point, our data import routines for changelog.com (which y’all know is an Elixir app) are written in Ruby. Why do I do this? Familiarity plays a big part. Also I find Ruby to be highly ergonomic for such tasks. Having said that, this article will make me consider trying Elixir for my next script.

Ecto 3 is right around the corner, and José Valim is blogging all about it as the release date approaches. This post is all about the breaking changes, which are few but significant. Most notably, the library will be split into two repositories: ecto and ecto_sql. Read the post to find out why.

Elixir gets its very own UI framework focused on connected devices (IoT). Scenic apps run identically across operating systems, including MacOS, Ubuntu, Nerves/Linux, and more. Notably, Scenic does not use any browser technologies. Learn all about it in Boyd Multerer’s ElixirConf 2018 talk.

Darin Wilson: In his keynote at ElixirConf last week, Chris McCord announced a new feature for the Phoenix web framework that caused many jaws to hit the floor, and had the hall buzzing when the talk was over. The new feature, tentatively called “LiveView”, allows developers to add dynamic, client-side interactions to web pages, using code that runs in Elixir on the server. What exactly is a LiveView, though? We don’t really know yet as this is an ongoing project and no code has been released yet. But as near as I can tell, a LiveView is lot like a React component running in a GenServer – it even has a render function! And with the EEx sigil (which I didn’t know was a thing) the code feels a lot like JSX I am unreasonably excited to see what becomes of this. 

This ~13 minute documentary hits the sweet spot of quality and duration. José is the focus, but it features other notable members of the community as well. Every language/ecosystem should have one of these made.

Rémi Prévost: Accent is an internal tool we built to help us manage translations for the applications we develop at Mirego. We used Elixir (Phoenix and Absinthe) and Ember.js and just a few weeks ago we open-sourced the project so we could share it with the community since there are not a lot of fully-working open-source Web applications for both of these technologies. Very cool. I’ve been toying with the idea of a GraphQL API around our news and podcasts. I should 👀 under the covers and see how Accent’s is built.

René Föhring shows how Plug.Conn and Ecto.Changeset are great examples of an advanced style of “flow” management where your program hands down a “token” (in practice, an Elixir struct) during execution.

Zack Kayser built a Texas Hold ‘Em app with the EEP (?) stack and wrote up his findings. He calls Elm and Elixir “a match made in Functional Heaven”, but the endeavor wasn’t without its challenges: I personally struggled with 1) how to organize my code, especially with larger modules, 2) figuring out how to make the UI more interactive, and 3) sharing code across modules. There’s a lot to learn from Zack’s experience. Both the Elm front-end and Phoenix back-end are open source. ✊

Chris McCord with a great round-up of advancements to the popular Elixir web framework. Highlights include H2 support, faster dev compilation, and a harder/better/faster/stronger JSON encoding library.

Cowboy 2.1 supports H2, but Plug and Phoenix haven’t released their official support yet. In this article, Chase Gilliam walks you through the steps to get your Phoenix app up and running with the new HTTP standard today.

Great list, and I agree with many of Vladimir’s points. However, I have to admit that Ecto’s take on preloading still bugs me after years of use. I find myself doing the preload dance all over the place even when I’m well aware of the performance issues around N+1 queries. I thought I’d get used to it over time, but it still irks me every time I see an Ecto.Association.NotLoaded exception.

Ecto’s issues have been cleaned up and tagged with labels like Level:Advanced, Level:Intermediate, and Level:Starter to make it easier to know where you’d like to contribute. @elixirlang on Twitter: We have just tidied up the issues tracker for Ecto. If you were planning to contribute, pull requests and feedback are definitely welcome. #

This is a great introduction to the Mox library written by José Valim and the Plataformatec team. Mox’ philosophy: A simple summary is that when it comes to dependency injection, mocks should not be created ad-hoc. Instead, they should be constrained by predefined behaviours. This helps enforce contracts between modules, and it also makes tests easier to maintain and understand. We’ve been using the Mock library when testing against 3rd party services, and it works as advertised. However, we don’t test our controllers in isolation like in this post. Should we be?

Run Elm on the server, via Elixir. Interesting idea…

Meta-programming in Elixir is all about macros. The use macro is one you’ll run in to often, and DockYard’s Luke Imhoff does a nice treatment of using use in this post.

We talked with Tim Mecklem about building an artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves to help those with Type 1 Diabetes who want to “loop” — a process which involves monitoring glucose levels, predicting where a person’s glucose levels are heading, then delivering insulin based on that prediction. Tim is a Developer at Gaslight in Cincinnati where he builds software solutions with Ruby and Elixir, and he’s a member of the Nerves Core team.

José Valim and Chris McCord joined the show to talk all about how they’re advancing the “state of the art” in the Elixir community with their release of Ecto 2.0 and Phoenix 1.2. We also share our journey with Elixir at The Changelog, find out what makes Phoenix’s new Presence feature so special, and even find time for Chris to field a few of our support requests.

José Valim joined the show to talk about Elixir. We learned about the early days of José’s start as a programmer. José took us back to the beginning of Elixir and shared why Erlang got him so excited, we broke down features of the language, we talked about functional programming, concurrency, developing for multi-core systems, we talked about the Elixir community, the future of Phoenix, Ecto, and more.

Brian Cardarella joined the show to talk about the bet he’s placed on Elixir and Ember to be the focus of his company.

Chris McCord joined the show to take us on a deep dive into the Phoenix web framework and Elixir. We covered the similarities between Ruby and Erlang, getting started with Elixir, and deploying Phoenix. He also shared his plans for the 1.0 release and the future of Phoenix.

npm, Inc closed $2.6MM in funding, Node successes, Ansible & Docker, Gulp vs Grunt, Vue.js, Polymer Boilerplate, Forceps, REPL Driven Development, Phoenix for Elixir, and more. Read Weekly - Issue #24