Hi Chris, some info about my use case, of which there are two, both in Phoenix – one present and one future.
- Lookup.
This is an app for storing short snippets of information – from things like the speed of light and Planck’s constant to links to various things I find on the web: political articles, github repositories, articles about code, you name it. Just two fields: title and description. URLs in the description field are rendered as links, e.g, http:foo.bar.io/yada/yada?baz=123 is rendered with link text “foo.ba.io”.
I use Mnemonix at the moment for just one thing: to record a list of IDs of records in the database result from the most recent relevant operation – search, create, edit, etc. In the case of deleting a record, the list is the empty one. This is needed to give the user a pleasant and efficient experience.
I plan to add users and authentication and then put this up on the web for all to enjoy. It will also help me, since I will then have access to my data anywhere there is a connection. I plan to use Mnemonix to hold the user’s JWT authentication token, the id list, and maybe more, e.g, preferences.
The code is at GitHub - jxxcarlson/lookup_server: A Phoenix server for Lookup · GitHub
- Rewrite the backend for Manuscripta.io:
Manuscripta is an app for creating, editing, and distributing lecture notes, although it can be used for other things. For writing techical docmentation (code, math, physics), it uses Asciidoctor-LaTeX (GitHub - asciidoctor-contrib/asciidoctor-latex: 📐 Add LaTeX features to AsciiDoc & convert AsciiDoc to LaTeX · GitHub), of which I am the principal developer.
Here is an example --my course notes – http://www.manuscripta.io/documents/jc.qft?toc
I am a refugee from the Rails world. I used Rails for the first version of Manuscripta, but (a) it was too slow, (b) the code got completely out of control. Partly my fault. It was my first real software development experience. Subsequently I split the app into a REST back end written with Hanami, a Ruby web framework which I really like (http://hanami.org). The current front end is written in Angular1 and I have an Angular2 version in the works. But I love elixir/phoenix and have found the functional programming style to my liking (I used to program in Scheme some time ago). Hence the plan to redo the backend in Phoenix. (1) Above was my starter project to learn Elixir and Phoenix. (I also wrote a command-line version of lookup – GitHub - jxxcarlson/Lookup: Command line program (Elixir) to create and search for records of the form [title, note] · GitHub)
One challenge (for me) of the backend project is that Phoenix will have to communicate with other processes: ruby for rendering Asciidoc-LaTeX documents into HTML and/or LaTeX, and for converting (when necessary) LaTeX docs to PDF.
I plan to rewrite the front end in Elm, but if you have thoughts on front end technologies, I am interested.
This is probably way too much info, but there you go!
PS – I’ll comment on docs, etc. tomorrow. Late here in Ohio!
