contex VS live-paint

Thanks! And thanks also for your work on ContEx, its Sparkline module [1] was a big inspiration for what I ended up implementing.

[1] https://github.com/mindok/contex/blob/master/lib/chart/spark...

Now, if you were using a server-side charting library like ContEx, then you would just append the new events to what you've already got assigned to the socket, and your normal rendering function would rebuild the chart. You're done! But I wanted to make it more complicated.

https://contex-charts.org

> What’s the story in Phoenix and Elixir land for handling external shell processes from web requests

Great story here thru erlang ports. I'm a big fan of the Porcelain library which wraps ports with some nice features on top:

Step up Contex!

A better balance would be to build the webapp in hybrid mode, some logic can be run by client-side javascript. Only the event handlers that rely on data from the server needed to be sent to the server.

In this pixel paint demo, the state and reaction of "changing the pen color" can happens locally: https://github.com/beenotung/live-paint/blob/master/server/a...