>
> I have converted larger Erlang codebases to Elixir incrementally
Jake, can you explain the rationale behind this? Why did you want to run
your apps in Elixir instead of Erlang?
> The most interesting thing is probably an example combining Zotonic with
> Phoenix.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Going one step
further: what about porting Zotonic to Elixir? There are a many reasons why
Zotonic and Phoenix (= Photonic ;) are a great match:
1. As of yet, there’s no fully-fledged CMS available for Phoenix/Elixir.
Having *a stable CMS for Phoenix* will enable developers to be more
productive in Elixir and attract more of them to start doing Elixir in the
first place. There’s definitely a demand for a Phoenix CMS: as Allen and
others write in this thread and again others have told me.
2. This is also a great chance for Zotonic. As most web developers on the
Beam VM are doing Elixir, it will be much easier for them to submit
improvements to an Elixir CMS than an Erlang one. So by porting Zotonic to
Elixir we will hopefully find *more contributors*.
3. The number of Zotonic contributors is rather small for such a large
product. One way to solve this problem is by *reducing the scope of Zotonic*.
Currently it has custom logic for HTTP (Cowmachine), templates (template
compiler), routes (dispatch compiler) and so on. All these belong to *web
applications in general, not a CMS specifically*. Let’s use Phoenix to take
care of these. Phoenix has a (much) larger community, so it can do these
fundamentals better and more efficiently than we can. Worst case, we would
have to build something on top of what Phoenix ships with out of the box,
such as adding adding dynamic routing
<https://gist.github.com/chrismccord/1c6b6fb086d5432d4e08>. Let’s stick to
*what
makes Zotonic unique*: its flexible datamodel, performant depcache,
(possibly) ErlyDTL template language.
(As a side-note, let’s not forget Zotonic is much older than Phoenix, and
Zotonic has been doing things such as real-time client/server communication
before Phoenix existed, let alone added Channels.)
4. Phoenix is well-designed and properly *decoupled* (Plug for HTTP, Ecto
for databases and Contexts for domain logic). The same cannot not always be
said of Zotonic. So switching over to Phoenix will result in smaller
Zotonic components written in higher-quality code.
5. Most web development on the Beam VM is happening in Elixir: if you need
authentication, JSON-LD parsing etc., there are much more likely to be
up-to-date, well-maintained and documented Elixir *packages available* on
Hex.pm than a single Erlang one. It therefore makes sense to integrate with
the Elixir ecosystem.
Cheers,
David
Op dinsdag 3 oktober 2017 04:23:11 UTC+2 schreef Jake Morrison:
>
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 10:39:04AM +, Marc Worrell wrote:
> >
> > > On 2 Oct 2017, at 02:19, Jake Morrison <ja...@cogini.com >
> wrote:
> > >
> > > Marc,
> > >
> > > On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 09:40:07AM +, Marc Worrell wrote:
> > >> Can mix build rebar3 based apps?
> > >
> > > Mix is more or less a replacement for rebar3, so they are mutually
> > > exclusive, though largely compatible.
> > >
> > >> If so then we can just provide a mix based project.
> > >
> > > For Elixir users, the easiest thing is if Zotonic can be used
> > > as a library which can be pulled in by mix/rebar from https://hex.pm/,
>
> > > i.e. it's a well behaved OTP application. It might make sense
> > > to have some mix tasks which e.g. create template modules.
> >
> > The master is being split in OTP apps, with the specific goal of
> > being reusable.
> >
> > Actually, there is not much left in the ‘zotonic.app’, almost everything
> > is moved to the other (OTP) apps.
> >
> > So I guess having a Mix (/Elixir) project that people can clone could
> > be a good starting point for Elixir devs.
>
> The most interesting thing is probably an example combining Zotonic with
> Phoenix.
>
> > >> I am also thinking of using the introspection (we are using that for
> > >> notify observers) to discover if a module, filter, action or other
> > >> type of Zotonic callback module is an Elixir module.
> > >> And if so we could generate or use some glue code to call directly
> > >> into the Elixir modules from Zotonic.
> > >
> > > Generally speaking, Elixir code is functionally the same as Erlang
> > > code, the module atoms just start with 'Elixir.', so that may not be
> > > necessary.
> >
> > So if an Elixir source file defines the Elixir equivalent of a function:
> >
