🔗 Unpacking Elixir: Phoenix

In this series I’ve been unpacking various facets of Elixir. Mostly this has meant trying to explain Erlang and the BEAM through the lens of Elixir. Now we are moving into the domain of the web framework. This is where I dare say that Elixir has much more to say than Erlang. Erlang has to my understanding never landed fully on a canonical preferred web framework. Elixir has Phoenix and this post will be unpacking Phoenix. The Elixir web framework.

As for Erlang this Awesome Erlang list has a ton of web frameworks. There have been many but I have never detected a consensus on what one “should” use. Actually, when I spoke to Robert Virding over beers at a conference I asked something about this and he more or less said that Elixir and Phoenix should be the preferred web framework for the BEAM. The exact question and the exact answer are muddled by time and memory. My understanding is that he much prefers Erlang for everything else but really wishes that people would just use LfE ;)

This should not be taken as a criticism of Erlang, rather a kudos to Elixir for establishing and maintaining this useful cohesion. The Elixir ecosystem has always had a fair bit of focus on the web in a way which Erlang has not.

People have built other web frameworks in Elixir. Phoenix remains the major player. It is the Rails/Django/Laravel of the Elixir ecosystem though I would argue it is more lightweight. In good ways and possibly bad.