By Chris McCord

A Love Letter to React

It's hard to overstate the impact React has had since its release in 2013. For me, React came with a few revelations. First was a reactive HTML-aware component model for building UIs. Second was colocated markup directly in the app code. Third, it...

By Chris McCord

How LiveView Took on a Life of Its Own

LiveView started with a simple itch. I wanted to write dynamic server-rendered applications without writing JavaScript. Think realtime validations on forms, or updating the quantity in a shopping cart. The server would do the work, with the client...

By Chris McCord

LiveBeats: Building a Social Music App With Phoenix LiveView

We decided that 2022 was a good year to ship a full-stack Phoenix reference app. The "full stack" metaphor has progressed beyond its humble beginnings of some REST endpoints and sprinkles of JS and CSS. Showing off a todo app is also no longer sta...

By Chris McCord

How Safari Ruined My Tuesday

Safari 15 shipped in September 2021 and included an obscure CSS bug that broke most LiveView applications. The LiveView client operates in two modes – connected, when it can talk to the server over websockets, and disconnected when offline. When L...

By Chris McCord

How We Got to LiveView

LiveView strips away layers of abstraction, because it solves both the client and server in a single abstraction. HTTP almost entirely falls away. No more REST. No more JSON. No GraphQL APIs, controllers, serializers, or resolvers. You just write ...