Ebook: Programming Phoenix LiveView

If you haven’t been following closely, it might seem like LiveView came suddenly, like a new seedling that breaks through the soil surface overnight. That narrative lacks a few important details, like all of the slow germination and growth that happens out of sight.

Chris McCord, the creator of Phoenix, worked on Ruby on Rails before coming over to the Elixir community. More and more often, his consultancy was asked to use Ruby on Rails to build dynamic single-page apps (SPAs). He tried to build a server-side framework on top of the Ruby on Rails infrastructure, much like LiveView, that would allow him to meet these demands for interactivity. But Chris recognized that the Ruby infrastructure was not robust enough to support his idea. He needed better reliability, higher throughput, and more even performance. He shopped around for a more appropriate language and infrastructure, and found Elixir.

The Phoenix team was able to build jаvascript features into LiveView that automate the process of changing a user interface on a socket connection. In LiveView, programmers would find a beautiful programming model based on tested concepts, and one that provided jаvascript infrastructure so developers didn’t need to write their own jаvascript.

This book is for advanced beginners and intermediate programmers who want to build web applications using Phoenix LiveView. In it, you’ll learn the basic abstractions that make LiveView work, and you’ll explore techniques that help you organize your code into layers that make sense. We will try not to bore you with a tedious feature-by-feature march. Instead, we’ll help you grasp LiveView by building a nontrivial application together.