Episode Details

Hello friends. I am back with another episode after a little break. Ah, episode 31 I finally feel great about Livewire. It is very true. Uh, so tomorrow I'm going on virtual stage at Laracon online to release live where 1.0 and demo sort of the state of Livewire, how I am building things with live wire these days to everybody.

And also Alpine. And I've got to say, I feel fricking great. I really do. Um, I don't know if I've ever felt this way about Livewire. So Livewire is one of those things that, it's controversial, it's radical. It's very different than any other way of building apps. And it all started with that little seed of that Phoenix live view post where I just saw this, this basic concept of like.

Making a click handler in the front end, run a method in the backend, rerender some HTML and swap it into the page. That was the seed. And then basically fast forward one year on this journey of me pushing this paradigm as far as I can and seeing if I, if seeing if it's a good pattern, if it's something that that is beneficial, is better.

There's obviously some clear advantages, but, but is it workable that that question always lingered for me. It's like, is it a, is it too much magic? Is there too much magic going on? Is this like not going to be, I don't know, future-proof or whatever? I don't know. All the things that you've, you feel when, when something is, is really magical.

Is it too much magic? Is it, is it too slow? That was the biggest one. That is by far the biggest one. All right, so we're using WebSockets pretty fast. I type into the browser, sends a WebSocket request to the backend, comes back, it's pretty darn fast. Um, you know, I click a button and a modal shows fairly fast, feels pretty much instant.

Can't use WebSockets PHP suck. Sorry. Use Ajax now. Clicking a button to show modal could be anywhere from instant to laggy, like 250 milliseconds or something. Oh, maybe Livewire is not. Is not the tool, but I kept pushing and I kept pushing and the thing that I would always come back to that I for myself is like, all right, if I throw live wire out the window, I'm basically going to end up rebuilding it myself.

I never threw it out the window. The way that I love to build apps is really, really simple. Plain blade, and if I need some complex interaction, I try to push this server fetched partials pattern as far as I can where you're sending an Ajax request to get HTML and swapping it into the page. And so basically, I've gone to this thought process a hundred times where I doubt myself so much that I throw it out mentally.

Like really go there. Like, like a stoic, like, like a really like put yourself in the place of the worst possible outcome in your mind. Put yourself in that place. Livewire is not good. Um, the, you know, inertia or whatever, other ways to build apps are much better. And then honestly, uh, you know, once I shed that, that I don't know if it's fear, uh, defensiveness.

When I shed those emotions, I end up recreating Livewire anyway for myself. That's what's kind of kept me going. And honestly, at the end of the day when it's dark and it's quiet, I love writing things with Lifewire. It's a really fun tool. I have so much fun doing it. It removes a lot of the pain and annoyances, um, of any other paradigm that I've used.

Okay. So is it slow? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be too slow, but here's, so here's the big revelation that that started to really hit me. The last episode that I published called building, I think I published it. It's at least sitting in the app I'm using to record these things. Episode 30 building, building Trello.

I can't even see the rest of the title. Something about building Trello with Livewire and that realization, I had that like, Whoa, you if live wire works well enough with JavaScript. Then it you can use it. It doesn't have to be any less efficient than any other paradigm. It doesn't have to