RealTime Drupal or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Elixir
frob
More and more of the web is moving to become real-time web-application. This is made possible with a technology called websockets which allow a standard http request to be upgraded to a stateful persistent connection. This connection allows communication not only of the web-server and browser, but also allows communication between native applications and can even allow a web-application to interact with real-time hardware.
While websockets are awesome, php sucks as websockets. And it is currently impossible to create a websocket connection directly to a Drupal site. Drupal is architected in a way that depends on a http request.
Elixir is a language that was built on Erlang (a language designed for us in telephony applications by engineers at Ericsson). The built in fault-tolerant nature of the language means that it is very well suited for long running application.
Phoenix is a “channel” based framework that was originally built as a next generation Rails for Elixir. Phoenix was born due to limitations in Ruby when dealing with concurrent real-time web-applications. Much like PHP, Ruby is not a language that is well suited for web-sockets. Not because it is not compatible with long running applications, but because it cannot handle the needed concurrency at scale.
Elixir and Phoenix are well suited for real-time web-applications that scale and Drupal is an awesome content management system that scales. Lets discuss how they can be used together.
I will showcase a proof-of-concept that uses Phoenix as a front-end to a Drupal-Tome based backend.
In this 90 minute session I will explore the technologies and possibilities that building real-time web applications have to offer. It differs from the 30 minute session in that it will also go indepth in the architechture around how my proof-of-concept works. There will be code.
My goal will be for the audience to leave with a general understanding of real-time web-applications and how they can enhance a digital experience, but moreover, I want them to know that real-time web-applications are not out of their reach to achieve.