PETAL, LiveView, and LAMP

Labeling Ideas and the Power of Association

Recently, Lars Wikman posted an interesting take on Thinking Elixir’s relatively new acronym called PETAL. It stands for Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine, and LiveView. As someone who has been involved in the Elixir community since before Phoenix even existed, I’ve watched the Elixir side of that acronym grow from a promising young technology to a group of tools that rivals the best in the industry.

Why the hype?

This set of tools is built around both productivity and scalability. They let small shops like mine produce serious sites. Look, the days of old-school request-response web apps are over. LiveView allows me to code with my focus firmly fixed on the server. I do three things:

• Design an abstract data model with the data elements I want to show on a page,
• Establish events with HTML markup and tiny functions to change that model, and
• Write a function to turn that data into HTML (or other kinds of text, like SVG) markup.

Then, I’m done. The programming model is stunningly productive, with very little custom JavaScript. The productivity allows a tidy code base that’s easy to carve into layers, so I expect the productivity gains to hold up, and even become more pronounced over time. Sprinkle in the right CSS, and my site can also be beautiful.

Why the slow going?

Technology adoption is hard. Elixir is brilliant, but it is based on a functional programming (FP) paradigm. FP is arguably more powerful than the most popular paradigm of the time, object oriented programming (OOP). Anyone who has ever been an early adopter of a programming language knows that overcoming the existing hegemony of Java, Python, C#, and Ruby is difficult at best. Even if you believe in FP, Elixir is only one of many FP languages. That means there are headwinds.

Even so, I believe the demands on typical development teams based on the growth of integrated applications with rich user interfaces and many kinds of clients are nearing the breaking point. That means there’s a window for something like PETAL, with LiveView as the driving technology.

WCAA? (Why coin another acronym?)

You might be thinking that Phoenix is definitely growing, and Elixir has slowly clawed its way to…