Phoenix Is Not Your Application

Frameworks are a great help to web developers in all languages. The productivity increases are real, but there's a catch. Framework elements tend to entangle and overshadow an application's domain entities. This effectively chains the application to the framework. Choosing a new framework, or choosing a new interface entirely, almost certainly means a rewrite. Elixir and Phoenix offer a way out. We can build an application in pure Elixir before we ever run "mix phoenix.new". We can test this application in isolation to improve our confidence in it. We can bring it into a new Phoenix project as a dependency. Then Phoenix can do what it does best, be the application's web interface.

Talk objectives: Expand our understanding beyond traditional patterns of web application development.

Explore new techniques that Elixir and Phoenix make available.

Understand the Elixir and Phoenix constructs which make these techniques possible.

Target audience: This talk is for anybody who is interested in web development.