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February’s Elixir reading list showcases both pragmatic solutions and forward-thinking innovations across the ecosystem. This month’s collection centres on enhancing developer experience and code quality, with a particular focus on debugging, component design, and integration patterns.

Developer tooling features prominently in LiveDebugger, a browser-based interface that transforms the LiveView development workflow. This tool provides detailed insights into LiveComponents and callback execution, addressing the unique debugging challenges presented by LiveView’s stateful architecture. Similarly, the discussion on making Elixir recompile when external files change illuminates optimisation strategies that leverage compile-time computation and the @external_resource attribute. These approaches demonstrate how Elixir’s design enables sophisticated tooling that aligns with developer workflows.

We look at code quality and architectural patterns in Good and Bad Elixir which explores common pitfalls in Elixir programming, advocating for more flexible abstractions through Access rather than structure-specific getters. The article’s critique of certain piping patterns and higher-order function usage emphasises the importance of composability in functional programming—a cornerstone of maintainable Elixir.

Database integration continues to evolve with Torus, which connects PostgreSQL’s search capabilities with Ecto. This library addresses the growing need for search functionality within Elixir apps, supporting various search types while promising future semantic and hybrid search capabilities.

Components and UI architecture receive considerable attention in Surface and Phoenix LiveView, where Marlus Saraiva discusses the evolution from templates to component-friendly approaches. The article highlights Phoenix’s journey toward a more composable framework through function components and HTMLEngine + HEEx templates, showing how the ecosystem continues to refine its approaches to building maintainable UIs.

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

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4-out-of-5-hats Good and Bad Elixir: The article explores the common pitfalls and best practices when coding in Elixir. It highlights the disadvantages of using functions like Map.get/2 and Keyword.get/2 because they tie you to a specific data structure, promoting the use of Access instead. Other key points include strategies for more effective error handling, avoiding the use of pipes when working with side-effecting functions, and the importance of refining how higher-order functions are used within pipelines. The goal is to encourage writing reusable and well-composed software components.

#Elixir #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #FunctionalProgramming #BestPractices

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4-out-of-5-hats Torus: Integrating PostgreSQL with Elixir: Torus is an advanced Elixir library designed for seamless integration of PostgreSQL’s search capabilities with Ecto, enhancing query building. It supports multiple search types, including pattern matching, similarity searches, and full-text searches. Future updates aim to add semantic and hybrid search functionalities, and provide optimised, scalable search options with third-party engines.

#Elixir #PostgreSQL #Ecto #Search #SoftwareDevelopment

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4-out-of-5-hats Introducing LiveDebugger: A New Tool for Debugging LiveView Applications: LiveDebugger is a tool designed to enhance the development experience for LiveView applications by offering a browser-based interface. It provides detailed views of LiveComponents, allows inspection of assigns, and includes tracing for callback executions. The tool is easy to integrate by adding it to your application dependencies in mix.exs and setting up some initial configuration to enable additional browser features.

#LiveView #LiveDebugger #WebDevelopment #DebuggingTools #SoftwareMansion

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4-out-of-5-hats Surface and Phoenix LiveView - what comes next?: Marlus Saraiva discusses the evolution of Phoenix from a template-based model to a component-friendly approach through new tools like function components and HTMLEngine + HEEx templates. This shift is intended to enhance the development experience in designing Phoenix applications by offering a more reusable, composable, and ergonomic framework. Furthermore, the Surface project provides additional insights and features for evolving the Phoenix LiveView towards a complete component model, outlining ongoing efforts to integrate these innovations without merging both projects entirely.

#Phoenix #LiveView #WebDevelopment #Elixir #Components

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4-out-of-5-hats Making Elixir Recompile When External Files Change: This article delves into optimising the Elixir language to efficiently handle recompilation when external file changes occur. By offloading computations to compile time and using the @externalresource attribute, developers can ensure that modifications to files trigger recompilations automatically, without needing to manually force a recompilation of the entire project. Moreover, the blog introduces the _mix_recompile?/0 function in Elixir 1.12 to fine-tune recompilation logic, accounting for changes in directory structure as well as content updates.

#ElixirLang #Programming #CompileTime #CodeOptimization #TechBlog

Regards,
M@

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Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.

QFM054: Elixir Reading List February 2025

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