Phoenix at Paris.ex meetup and the hope for a reference Phoenix Open Source application
Paris.ex meetup #4 took place end of november. It was great gathering. We now have the right venue. People are friendly and enjoying the time together.
Developers are coming back and are starting to volunteer for (short) talks. New faces are showing up. We are doing a great job.
The topic this time was quite huge and central to the Elixir community.
I made a presentation on the Phoenix framework covering most aspect of the framework:
- Mandatory explanations on framework design goal
- Description on the focus on performance and productivity
- Architecture of the framework.
- Short tutorial covering setting up a new Phoenix project with scaffolding, Plug example, and Channel step-by-step demo.
The presentation slides in PDF can be downloaded here: Introduction au développement Web avec le framework Phoenix
While preparing this presentation, I needed an hypothetical application. I realized that the Phoenix world did not have a kind of canonical application that could serve as an example for Phoenix application. Those that have been programming in Java in the early days of Java server platforms may remember the (in)famous Java Pet Store.
I thought about using a more useful example that could illustrate Phoenix website development and could even turn into a real community website.
Since a long time I had the idea of a community site for publishing restaurant review by children, using their own criteria (like service time, specific attention from staff, space to run between meals, etc). I had started a prototype on Ruby on Rails with my children a few years ago.
I thought I could revive the project for Elixir Phoenix framework. While giving my Phoenix talk yesterday, I thought Paris.ex meetup group could use that application as an illustration for new Elixir talks for the meetup events to come. There is plenty to illustrate: Real user management / authentication, better model for restaurant and children review, link to parent account for approval, production deployment.
We are already discussing diving deep into Ecto or demonstrating exrm with that application for example.
We were all enthusiastic yesterday about using that demo as a tool to illustrate various aspects of Elixir programming.
Of course, it is not exclusive to Paris.ex. If other Elixir groups wants to join and help build a kind of Phoenix Elixir reference application, you are welcome. That’s why we use English as primary development language (even if we hope to have a multilingual app).
If we reach a good state, I even have the matching domain name to deploy a production version !
Let’s see where this leads us ! I hope Gastronokids will become the Phoenix framework reference project someday.
What happens next depends on you !
The initial code of the project is on Github: ElixirParis/gastronokids
This is not more that a stock Phoenix scaffold at the moment, but we hope to improve it from month to month.
See you at next Paris.ex meetup in january 2016 !
You can watch here the recording of my talk (in French):