Elixir – Phoenix LiveView Native (opens in new tab)

A good number of native apps are unusable without an internet connection.

We just accept that our fragmented software landscape spans several backend technology stacks, web browsers and two dominant mobile platforms that are in constant flux. ES6, Typescript, Swift and Kotlin didn't even exist a decade ago and their constantly shifting ecosystems are nearly impossible for a single developer to keep up with. Higher barriers to entry work well for the large companies that dominate our industry so they continue to churn out complexity as best practice.

Allowing a single developer to deliver customer-facing applications without the context switch and coordination overhead of a team is a big deal. In the 80s and 90s, this was possible. Today, even deployment has become a specialised role. Not every engineer wants to be forced into a backend or frontend role in an agile team with product owners and ceremonies. There needs to be room for the craftsman in our industry. This is a step towards empowering the individual hacker again.

Liveview Native is not hugely compelling if you're only looking at it from the perspective of an established company or funded startup that can afford a team of more than 3-6 engineers and devops. As a solo dev or bootstrapped startup with limited resources, this is a killer feature for elixir and phoenix.

I guess that Phoenix LiveView is going to blow B2B apps up at some point. I'm thinking of ATM / smart vending machine / smart ads board. Yes, those that are 100% internet connected.

My assumption was that you ship the server software together with the desktop software, maybe could even be one file. So running the binary runs the server + open the UI, shutting everything down when the UI closes.

You can do something similar with Tauri in Rust, so you get a desktop application communicating via local http in just one binary.

I think AirBnB is using Server-Driven UIs (SDUI) in its native apps. One may have at least one native screen just for fallback. Most of the apps are not offline-first anyway, in the best case they implement some speculative/optimistic UI with retries for cases when connection suddenly drops for short amount of time.

I'd say only tiny number of mobile apps support true offline operation, e.g. supporting following buzzwords:

  Offline-first
  Occasionally-connected systems
  Infrequently-connected systems
  Partial connectivity
  Intermittent connectivity

Packaging a webserver together with an app is also an old idea, though clearly hackish, it's probably better fit for embedded devices/IoT and desktop apps, much less for mobile.

Social networks, news sites, online marketplaces or retail.

I would imagine the experience to not be any different from trying to use the Twitter app when you lose connectivity. The app can choose to either: 1. Degrade the experience gracefully. Still function in a limited way. 2. Display a network error message, pausing whatever action the user was about to take. Keep retrying for a bit.

PWA can get you almost there. But LiveView is server rendered (business logic lives on the server). A loss of internet would render such an app unusable.

With this technology, I believe they are bundling the Phoenix LiveView server in the binary - to alleviate that gap. It’s like packaging node + app in a binary.

I think, the appeal here is LiveView. You can develop a SPA/OPA native app without writing any JavaScript. The code is entirely Elixir + HTML + CSS. Bundle it with SQLite and you’ve got a decent stack now that can even work offline.

Disclaimer: I didn’t see many details on the project page. My assumptions may be incorrect.

Let me check which native apps I'm using most.

Banking apps, all online

OSMAnd, offline

Cool Reader, offline

Some go (game) apps, one online, the others offline

K9, mostly online

NewPipe and YouTube, online

Maps, online

Gallery, Camera, Calculator, Notes, File Manager, offline.

So there is a space for about half of what I use to be built with Phoenix Native and probably I'm using less online apps than most people.

Yes, this feels like the exact opposite of an offline-first approach that many tout as being useful for applications in general.

Are you assuming that it is going to be online only or is there an architecture doc that says that?

There are already examples where iOS app has embedded Phoenix server to which the webview client talks to locally on the phone. The local server can then sync with a cloud server however it wishes.

> I’m having a super hard time understanding why you’d want a native app require 100% connectivity.

> Did i miss something ??

Yes. The article writers gave their reasons for why they are offering a native implementation of phoenix liveview.

  * Build complex, client-side applications that are faster and lighter than
    those built with heavy JavaScript frameworks
  * Deliver better user experiences across all platforms (no more "uncanny
    valley" effect)
  * Optimize productivity and resources with a single team, managing a single
    code base across the web and native

Would be interesting to see if the idea was to have the server + client native complete with local storage and then have the BEAM node connect elsewhere.

Try switching off the internet of your phone and report how many apps are still working after that, there's actually very few of them.

I think many of the business apps I use (banking, train tickets, shops...) are literally just webviews, and could benefit from this kind of system to make a much more native-feeling app at a low budget. A lot of these apps aren't particularly useful without an internet connection.

It reminds me of so-called "hybrid" apps: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native...

I can’t do much with my native email app without connectivity.

you can run the phoenix app locally, i guess?

The community seems stronger than ever. What was your experience of its fading away like? Projects like this don’t give the impression of a language falling by the wayside. People tend to fall in love with Elixir. You never forget falling in love.

What drives great web framework is a culture of making product. RoR and PHP based frameworks have massive product makers, thus it drives forces into libraries made for variety of products.

Elixir's culture is engineering-ish. So you will see decent libs that deal with weird mechanism stuff, but lack of vibe and forces driven from business needs.

That hasn’t been my experience at all. ElixirConf was well attended this year and regional conferences are coming back. The Slack is active. Most of the podcasts are still running.

Elixir was one of the few languages I saw in companies (albeit, infrequently) that wasn't like Java, C#, Python, or JS (Scala here and there). Was always curious about it as perhaps something that could be reasonably pitched as having some nominal uptake.

Pure anecdata there also. Literally just ones I have personally seen on clients or heard about from coworkers.

Interesting, I was thinking the opposite. Elixir Forum has so much volume I stopped following it 1-2 years ago and now hang out in the much quieter Erlang Forum :D

What gave you that impression?

I'd be curious what gave you this impression?

There's no WASM involved and the BEAM is not running on the device. It works like LiveView, except instead of an HTML DOM you have a SwiftUI hierarchy. The client side of LiveView is a SwiftUI view itself, you can use many standard SwiftUI views, and also add your own custom ones for when you need something bespoke. It can be the whole app or just part of one.

If it's anything like Phoenix, it's just websocket based on the client (iOS device in this case) which has a DOM diffing mechanism to patch in updates from the Elixir backend.

Short answer: no the client side is not elixir I suspect.

They jumped the gun a bit with the page, but what I have been able to piece together so far is that they renamed the WASM runtime from Lumen to FireFly and FireFly is what powers this through WASM.

So OTP is running natively on the phone.

This is essentially React Native reinvented with Elixir, which to me is pretty awesome because I really dislike React Native although we have done quite a few projects with it :)

Edit: Totally mistaken, I stand corrected! Turns out I jumped the gun instead. Hopefully FireFly and this CAN give me the RN replacement I desire.

Eww, that page renders “post not found” (though with a 200 response), and then replaces it with the actual content via client-side scripting. The effrontery of the header text “It looks like you’re checking to see that we’re server-side rendering. We are!” is palpable.

This is a MUCH better link, thank you for sharing.

That should be the post link. The current link doesn't really explain anything at all.

Yes, that is what it is.

The confs I've seen tend to release videos later.

Virtual tickets probably make decent money and I think most confa want to clean up the long-lived video before putting it out. Low incentives to stream for free it seems.

There is a tutorial up https://liveviewnative.github.io/liveview-client-swiftui/tut...

There’s the ElixirConf 2022 chat app: https://github.com/liveviewnative/elixirconf_chat

It is open source https://github.com/liveviewnative

No, Elixir Desktop is a great project as well. It packages up the BEAM entirely into a native binary. So Elixir/Erlang runs natively on the phone. LiveView Native will render actual native SwiftUI components into the SwiftUI viewtree. In other words, LVN is just a client whereas Elixir Desktop is the entire BEAM runtime/VM

There is a sample app and tutorial here: https://github.com/liveviewnative

I haven't done any Rails dev work in a while but as I understand it the Rails implementation is a Webview, not actual native UI