Overview

LiveView is the term used by Elixir's Phoenix Framework to describe their approach to server-side rendering. This library implements LiveView using a ELM-like architecture. While the ELM-architecture is typically implemented entirely on the client, LiveView moves the client-server boundary between the browser and the state.

• After the initial page load, the client and server keep communicating using a WebSocket connection.
• The client sends events (e.g. button clicks) to the server.
• The state is mutated using the Component::update function.
• The state is rendered to a DOM using the Component::view function.
• The previous DOM and the new DOM are compared and an incremental update is generated.
• The incremental update is transmitted to the client and applied to the real DOM.

Benefits

• no state duplication between client and server
• effortless synchronisation between multiple clients
• effortless session resumption
• low bandwidth incremental updates
• no need for separate client application
• no need for api endpoints on the server

Drawbacks

• the website can only be used if the WebSocket is connected
• round trip latency for every interaction

Usage

Please take a look at the documentation and the examples. Until the public API has settled, the README would probably always be outdated.

Examples

• counter - a simple counter
• streaming - a generator pushes a new element to a list every 10ms.

Meta

Contributing

Contributions of any kind are always welcome. You can use the modern Issue / PR workflow or the traditional E-Mail based Git workflow.

Contact

You can contact me (the author) using issues or per E-Mail at liveview-rs@pfzetto.de.

License

This project is licensed under MPLv2.