Phoenix, an opinionated web framework built with Elixir, is taking the web dev world by storm. Like Rails, it's focused on productivity, but because it is built on the foundation of Erlang and the BEAM (Erlang Virtual Machine), it can be strong in the areas where Rails tends to struggle a bit.
First, I'll provide a quick intro to Elixir & Phoenix, oriented toward developers who are used to Ruby & Rails conventions. We'll cover routing, the handling of incoming requests (this is done quite differently in Phoenix compared to Rails) and the model layer -- comparing ActiveRecord to Ecto.
Next, we’ll set up a couple of simple CRUD resources in Phoenix, and try two approaches of running it side-by-side with Rails. Knowing how to do this is important if you aim to incrementally migrate from one framework to the other, over some period of time.
Finally, I'll provide a few patterns as to how you could start migrating key pieces of your app over to elixir gradually, using Rails as thin REST API layer, and relying on Elixir & Phoenix as a powerful background job processor. Attendees will be left with a general understanding of how Elixir & Phoenix work, and how to leverage the awesome concurrency, without rewriting their whole Rails app.