elixir-raknet
scrivener_ecto
Our great sponsors
| elixir-raknet | scrivener_ecto | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 3 | |
| 211 | 550 | |
| 0.5% | - | |
| 0.0 | 0.0 | |
| 7 months ago | 10 months ago | |
| Elixir | Elixir | |
| MIT License | MIT License |
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elixir-raknet
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Bootstrapping a multiplayer server with Elixir at X-Plane
The core of the X-Plane server is our RakNet UDP protocol, which is open sourced under the MIT license here:
https://github.com/X-Plane/elixir-raknet
It's not a full game server, but the "Usage" section of the README provides a sketch of what the rest of the server (the part that implements the business logic) looks like.
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10 Years(-Ish) of Elixir
Happy Elixir user here. At work we have a use case that isn't covered by José's high-level overview of the domains Elixir's used in: we run a massive multiplayer game server on it.
This is actually a really good fit. (It kind of rhymes with the original use of Erlang, being telecoms infrastructure.) We get outstanding concurrency support, high reliability, and really efficient development times. I can't imagine shipping this feature with a server written in C++ (the language I'm most comfortable in), and I can't imagine scaling it the way we need to if we'd gone for a traditional web language like Node, PHP, etc.
If you're interested, you can see the RakNet (game networking protocol) implementation we use on the server here:
https://github.com/X-Plane/elixir-raknet
The README gives a good overview of the full MMO server's architecture, too: each client connection is a stateful Elixir process (not to be confused with a heavy-weight OS process!), acting asynchronously on a client state struct; clients then asynchronously schedule themselves to send updates back to the user.
scrivener_ecto
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Probuild Ex Part Four
An infinite scroll with liveview hook and scrivener_ecto
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Probuild Ex Part Three
paginate the query with scrivener_ecto
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10 Years(-Ish) of Elixir
> As for libraries, I challenge anyone to name an unmet dependency in Elixir that is 1) trivial to implement and 2) not for some niche application.
For quite some time the ex_aws[0] package was no longer maintained because the only person who maintained it stopped using AWS. There were many months in between before a new maintainer was found.
The ecto pagination[1] package has a "low maintenance" warning, basically the author is no longer maintaining it except for fixing issues even though there's a number of interesting features that could be added that other web frameworks have available.
The arc file upload[2] package was no longer maintained or touched for a really long time until someone took it over but now that new package is also racking up open issues and looks like it kind of stagnated in development. This isn't based on looking at last commit times too. I mean there's issues open to address important topics that haven't gotten reviewed.
There's also no official Stripe package for Elixir and all of the Elixir ones feel kind of abandoned or no where near feature parity with Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Golang or any of the other official packages offered by Stripe. This is the last thing I want to have to implement myself since it's so critically important. The same can be said for PayPal and Braintree integration. There's official SDKs for Python, Node, etc. but not Elixir. I've asked Stripe a couple of times about an Elixir client and they all say the demand is not near enough to consider creating one.
These are only a few examples of tools I've found in questionable state when working with Elixir compared to Python and Ruby. All of which are very important in a ton of applications.
Then there's also less generic but still really useful things like notification abstractions to send emails, texts or broadcast notifications to a browser. Rails, Laravel and Django all have first class solutions to this where you can get up and running in no time but with Phoenix you'll have to write all of this on your own. It's a huge undertaking.
Long story short, I started with Phoenix and Elixir almost 2 years ago and today 2 years later I feel like if you plan to write any type of business'y app with Phoenix you're going to have to end up writing a ton of libraries yourself instead of focusing on your business problem. That might not be a problem if you have a huge team and your business idea is already proven and 5+ years old but for anyone who wants to build something and see if it works, it's hard to say you'll be able to build something faster than Rails, Laravel, Django or Flask if you already know one of those frameworks.
Now you might say some of those packages are trivial to write but they're really not. That seems to be a common pattern I've seen with the Elixir community where someone will say just do it yourself because it's easy and then you're left hanging. Sure maybe it's easy if you're Jose or someone with 5+ years of prior Elixir experience and have written 100k+ lines of Elixir code but a regular developer who just wants to build web apps (not libraries) is going run into tons of roadblocks. I know I did.
[0]: https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws
[1]: https://github.com/drewolson/scrivener_ecto
[2]: https://github.com/stavro/arc
What are some alternatives?
credo - A static code analysis tool for the Elixir language with a focus on code consistency and teaching.
ex_venture - Text based MMORPG engine written in Elixir
canada - Easy permission definitions in Elixir apps!
phx_gen_auth - An authentication system generator for Phoenix 1.5 applications.
probuild_ex - :star: Probuild clone in elixir
stm_agent - Software transactional memory for Elixir.
flyctl - Command line tools for fly.io services