Transport-site Alternatives

transport-site reviews and mentions

• Nginx Unit – Universal web app server
  17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023

  > Yes, this is as bad as it looks: “success” isn’t even part of the schema. It’s in the examples, but not the actual schema definition.

  Having gone through a pretty heavy overhaul of an "OpenAPI" (full code in Elixir at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/pull/3351), I stumbled on that exact type of problem!

  At the scale of nginx, having automatic verification that the examples (and the output of the API in general) match the specification would be great.

  At our scale, here is what really helped me go through the rework (and ensure we do not regress too easily):

  - setting additionalProperties to "false" to detect key field "rot"

  - using "required: [x,y,z]" on everything, and by default specify "all the property keys", with an opt-out (so that each time a developer adds a field later, it is considered mandatory, unless otherwise specified)

  - use tooling during the tests: "assert_schema" (with OpenAPISpex) to ensure our API endpoints responses pass the spec (additionalProperties: false helps ensure we get an exception in case of key field rot, again!)

  - even more useful: crawl our production most important endpoints and tweak the spec until everything is green (an example of useful use of Task.async_stream in Elixir, by the way) https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/pull/3351/files#dif...

  It can be super frustrating for users to live with the uncertainty of the response of an API for sure, and I was happy to discover the Elixir tooling (OpenAPISpex in particular) worked so nicely once I understood what I had to do.

• Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Aug 2023

  Very convenient to parallelise HTTP queries (and without the need to go “evented”).

  One recent example where I assert that API responses match our OpenAPI specifications here, for the curious:

  https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/pull/3351/files#dif...

• Scripting with Elixir
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jun 2023

  I've been a big fan of "Mix.install" since it was released!

  I believe this made me use Elixir instead of Ruby (my natural scripting language) more and more.

  I use it on a regular basis for my work on https://transport.data.gouv.fr/ (which is Elixir-based and open-source), as one can see at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/scripts.

  What I like the most is that it helps me start ideas, experiments & data analysis with their own set of dependencies (without much care of "will this impact the main application?"), store those experiments in the same repo at the main application, and maybe later promote some of those experiments to the main application source code.

  Concrete examples include:

• Ask HN: So, what's up with Phoenix (web framework)?
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Aug 2022

  I'm one of the 3 maintainers of the French open-data transportation access point (at https://transport.data.gouv.fr/?locale=en), which runs on top of Elixir & Phoenix.

  I'm not a big fan of surveys and I'm not sure I've responded to this one actually, but: my current feeling around Phoenix is that it will be my go-to framework for anything web related for the years to come, but also Elixir will be, for larger topics (ML, embedded, data-viz, scripting, etc).

  There are a number of important points (to my taste) that comes out of my use of Elixir & Phoenix :

  - the maintenance story has been quite good (maintenance work is one of my main line of work since year 2k, I have used many stacks, including Java, .Net, RubyOnRails etc). Upgrades and refactoring & moving code around has been quite easy overall, once you get the stuff right (using Mox etc).

  - Phoenix, Ecto & Elixir are a good "generalist web framework" for a lot of use

  - Compared to some stacks (non-evented Ruby & Python, for instance), having a part of your app work as a proxy for domain-specific uses, is not a problem, and does not even require you to split that part from the main app (example at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un..., where we proxy/cache GTFS-RT protobuf & SIRI XML feeds behind rules, adding rate-limiting & hiding target server authentication schemes)

  - Similarly, anything real-time is at least initially trivial. For instance, creating this real-time view of moving vehicles (https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore) with 70+ GTFS-RT feeds has been quite easy (PR at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/pull/2224). The server side is like "EventMachine done right", and the live updates are broadcasted to each client via web socket. No extra server (e.g. AnyCable) or anything is needed.

  From a perf/ops POV, the amount of topics you do not even have to think about is quite important, which is very nice.

  Overall I can see myself sticking to this stack for the next 15 years or so, without much worries (I've been coding since 1984 as a kid, so I have a good idea to know when to keep a framework around or not :P)

• Phoenix 1.6.0-RC.0 Released
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Aug 2021

  Stripe, Shopify and GitHub are still largely relying on Ruby as far as I know (and while there are reimplementations of some services in some langages, I don't think C++ or Java have been publicly mentioned often).

  That said, I think one important asset of Elixir (in my view) is not the raw performance, but the overall "total cost of ownership" (including maintenance work, and software is a lot of maintenance).

  Being able to simplify architectures is something that is nicely done with Elixir, actually.

  If a part of an app needs to play a "proxy" role (like here https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...), then I just add a component to the app, and I can keep the incoming connections under hand, all while issuing external queries etc.

  If there is a need to do some rich interactive dashboards, I can use LiveView.

  If I need to demonstrate some simple stuff, I can use "Mix.install" to create one-off scripts.

  If I need to do more data-science, I can tap into LiveBook, VegaLite etc.

  All this with a small team or as a solo developer, is quite great, much more than raw performance, in my eyes.

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