Ember Phoenix Chan

Elixir has a great web framework called Phoenix that ships with support for real-time communication (via sockets / long poll). Ember, being a front-end framework, can benefit a lot from gaining real-time capabilities.

This addon grabs phoenix.js from the Phoenix framework and puts it into your Ember app.

How to use

Directly import where needed:

import Phoenix from 'ember-phoenix-chan';
const {Socket, Channel, LongPoll, Ajax, Presence} = Phoenix;

To get started on building a Phoenix Elixir app, consult the good guide on Phoenix here:

http://www.phoenixframework.org/docs/channels

Chris McCord has written a good example of how to use the js sockets exposed by phoenix.js:

https://github.com/chrismccord/phoenix_chat_example/blob/master/web/static/js/app.js

The source code for phoenix.js is here:

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/master/web/static/js/phoenix.js

Starting in Phoenix 1.2, you now have access to this thing called "Presence" which is some CRDT-based distributed state synchronization tool built natively into Phoenix. Read about it here:

https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/1.2.0-rc.1/Phoenix.Presence.html#summary

Testing and Development

You'll need Elixir, Erlang, and the OTP on your local computer.

You can get those things at the elixir website:

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Once you have the tools for the backend, you can boot them up like so:

cd ..
npm install && bower install
 
# Alternatively, use ./bin/phoenix 
cd bower_components/phoenix_chat_example
mix local.hex
mix deps.get
iex -S mix phoenix.server
 
ember s

And navigate to localhost:4200 in your browser.

In order to properly test, you'll need to open up 2 tabs. Try filling out the form and creating a new camera object, you'll see that it propages to the other tab nicely. Clicking on the created camera objects deletes them (this also propagates).

The reason this isn't automated is because it's a lot of work rigging out phantomjs (or Capybara) to use multiple tabs to test (lol), but I need this addon right now.

TODOs

1. Implement query filtering in the channel-store
2. Decouple phoenix.js from ChannelStore to allow for other WebSocket methods
3. Rig up automated tests with either Phantom or Capybara
4. More error handling and sensible error messages
5. Conform to more of DDP's specifications
6. Draw a mai-waifu-moe-am-i-kawaii-uguu~ logo

Installation

• git clone this repository
• npm install
• bower install

Running

• ember server
• Visit your app at http://localhost:4200.

Running Tests

• ember test
• ember test --server

Building

• ember build

For more information on using ember-cli, visit http://www.ember-cli.com/.