surface VS Play

I should have been more clear that my intent was to create/use a compiler for some kind of component syntax. There are lots of them, from Surface (Elixir), Blade (PHP/Laravel), and JSX (React, Vue, Etc)

There I learned more deeply about LiveView and Surface UI.

I think Surface is the ideal candidate for this. But it doesn’t have the components you are looking for but you can build anything with it. Hopefully, in future we can have set of headless components built using Surface 🤞

I have worked with Phoenix LiveView and Surface-UI for about a year; I would like to share some of the things I learned the hard way.

This is just an idea, but what about implementing using Phoenix.View(via use MyAppWeb, :view in your module)? Then assign I think has access to @conn. Then maybe work some magic to still allow Phoenix.Component syntax - but at this point, this is something I believe is a flow that might be in development. Try investigating / asking in Surface, because that is a lot more similar to React in its approach. In fact, I think Surface is where more aggressive features are pushed out, and ironed-out features get included into Phoenix. This was the case for Phoenix.Component, and HEEX.

This post is intended to get you started with surface provided components. I provided the original code and surface versions so you can compare the differences yourself without installing anything. After installing surface following the installation guide https://surface-ui.org/getting_started add surface_bulma in your mix.exs, this will allow you to use the table component.

I totally get the "Am I doing this the right way?" feeling, especially coming from Rails where everything was so opinionated and wanting to stay idiomatic.

Phoenix, while it does have opinions, is far less opinionated in the sense that it doesn't do it darndest to force you into certain conventions (for example, if your module name doesn't match your file name, Phoenix won't complain). Its generators do try and push you toward using good DDD practices (which is my opinion is a GREAT thing), but of course the generators are completely optional.

I don't have experience writing large LiveView apps but I would say that if you are familiar with any component-based frameworks (like React), I would take a look at SurfaceUI[1]. It simplifies a few "gotchas" in LiveView (though I would say they are very minor gotchas and worth learning about at some point) and gives you a component-rendering syntax more like React. Once you get going, you'll learn that LiveView doesn't have all the headaches that come with bigger React apps (like having to memoize functions or comparing props to avoid a re-render and whatnot). The recent release candidate for Phoenix 1.6 has made strides for a cleaner component syntax, but if you're having trouble with LiveView, Surface might bring some familiarity.

[1] https://github.com/surface-ui/surface

Have you seen Surface UI? Pretty cool. Collection of LiveView components. https://surface-ui.org/

My major complain here is that, as far as being a web framework there is precious little information here about the framework. How does this framework scale with multiple requests? What concurrency strategy is it using (threads, processes, actors, etc?). Is this opinionated (it doesn't seem so but it also doesn't say it isn't either). How does this work with popular libraries x,y,z. The full docs have a little bit more information, but not a ton. But mostly there are some cute toy examples and "built in python" and thats about it.

Lets compare this with for example play https://www.playframework.com/ I know from this that it built on Akka, its stateless, aims for predictable resource consumption, has non-blocking io, etc. There is a ton of really important information on what does this web framework actually do that is really important when you are making a choice of a framework.

I have no idea how good this framework is, but besides a few toy examples, I can't see anything that makes me thing "wow this is great I need to use this".

A web application framework for Java/Scala: https://www.playframework.com/

Scala 3 migration isn't as simple as migrating other apps, you can track the work at https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11260

And there are frameworks you can use to make development easier, like Play. And Java has plenty of choices for dependency injection frameworks.

However do note, Play should be perfectly usable as well, and it's still maintained by the community: https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11649

In university I learned a bit of Java, so maybe I could use it professionally I guess?. There were many options to choose from. DropWizard, Spark, Play Framework. But the more documented one in the internet I found was Springboot, besides there were some courses in spanish and some friends that knew something about Springboot, so I give it a chance.

For a backend web server I use Play - https://www.playframework.com/ which I find to be the easiest one as a backend web server. For learning/using spark I found this course from coursera to be very useful. https://www.coursera.org/learn/scala-spark-big-data