[birdfood]

I've been having a similar experience trying to build an app with liveview. I've been simultaneously building the same app with Phoenix + LiveView and Dream (OCaml) + HTMX. With the OCaml stack I'm finding it really easy to follow the data flow through the whole app thanks to the compiler. With the Phoenix app I'm struggling to internalise how all the code fits together and having to navigate the code base off searching for strings alone (vscode editor tooling seems to just not work for me?). I'm also struggling to grasp how state is stored in a liveview and it isn't helped that a lot of the resources I've found online are now out of date. Going with a simpler approach of MVC sounds promising - I do want to get to the point where I'm actually taking advantage of the BEAM (I'm aiming for long running processes + user interactivity + maybe multi-user editing).

I'd be keen to hear your development workflow for building an MVC style app, what you use for the front end, and how you go about refactoring, e.g. when editing a struct which is stored in the DB and shown in a view is when I particularly feel like I'm flying blind.

[goosejuice]

Jump to definition works well with each of the lsps out there. Has for years. No refactoring functionality but llms filled that gap.

Each liveview is an isolated process. You can easily inspect this in the process tree with the phx dashboard that is bundled. State & messaging is certainly the hard part to grok with the beam. I found elixir in action to cover these concepts very well and nothing has really changed since it's first release.

Your experiencing trying to follow data through Phoenix is the complete opposite than what I had when I picked it up many years ago. The request response cycle is pretty straightforward to follow being a struct piped through the endpoint. Liveview isn't much different. Breath of fresh air for me really. Coming from a year or two studying rails which is a nightmare in comparison with all the metaprogramming.

While I do think you can be productive in this stack without knowing much about the BEAM, just taking a week or so to get to know it will pay dividends. It's a paradigm shift compared to a lot of what's out there -- but isn't one that I found difficult to grok as a new developer in the middle of my CS undergrad at the time. Many of my friends shrugging it off for python found their way to elixir eventually :)

[goosejuice]

I found this free resource that explains the phoenix liveview lifecycle pretty well if helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffB9gmzYJJg.

[myaccountonhn]

I echo this. It’s always the struggle of DIY + understanding what’s going on versus taking the magic off the shelf solution where it works until it doesn’t.