At ElixirConf 2022, we highlighted four of our newest R&D initiatives: LiveView Native, Beacon, Firefly, and DockYard Academy. You can read more about our other efforts to broaden the Elixir toolkit in our Beacon and Firefly blog posts. And learn how we’re helping grow the Elixir community in our DockYard Academy Q&A.
For years, DockYard has been committed to advancing Elixir and broadening the community by introducing new tools, improving processes, and generally increasing the use cases for Elixir.
Now we’re thrilled to announce one of the latest developments to come out of that commitment: LiveView Native. This new framework gives development teams the ability to build native and web applications entirely in Phoenix. With it, there’s no need to maintain multiple frameworks for the web and native versions of the same application.
LiveView Native removes the barriers of coordinating multiple teams for your digital products. Read on for more on what LiveView Native is, who it will benefit, and how it works.
What is LiveView Native?
LiveView Native is a new framework that empowers Elixir developers to build native applications with LiveView. Now a single team creating web applications with Elixir can do the same for native applications as well.
LiveView Native operates for Elixir much in the same way that React Native does for JavaScript—it lets teams work more efficiently by eliminating the need to maintain multiple frameworks or multiple programming languages for the same digital product.
“Phoenix serving your web views, your mobile native views, and acting as your server-side framework creates an even more cohesive and single-stack team,” says DockYard CEO Brian Cardarella.
How does it benefit me?
With LiveView Native, even organizations with small engineering teams can create custom web and native applications that incorporate the speed, reliability, and concurrency benefits of Elixir and LiveView.
LiveView Native gives organizations a new tool to meet product deadlines faster, with fewer hurdles along the way. With one team capable of building web and native applications, there are fewer opportunities for delays that could spell missed product deadlines.
And the benefits go beyond the initial development phase. A single team can now manage both the web and native applications, removing the barriers of pushing changes through multiple frameworks and multiple languages. It gives development teams the ability to achieve more with fewer resources.
In addition, LiveView Native doesn’t force developers to choose a single UI to implement across platforms.
Regardless of whether you’re building for iOS or Android, LiveView Native gives you the tools to build an application that looks and functions like a truly native product. There’s no common UI forced onto all LiveView Native users. Instead, you’ll be able to use iOS or Android templates that make use of the component UI that comes with either platform.
Who is it for?
Any team that wants to eliminate the bottleneck of building and maintaining native and web applications built using two different frameworks. With LiveView Native, you’ll be able to rely on a single team of developers to handle your application.
LiveView Native brings a new level of efficiency to developing with Elixir, making it ideal for teams searching for ways to create reliable, scalable products with as few resources as possible.
With it, there’s no longer a need to replicate the work completed for an Elixir web application in a different programming language to keep your native application consistent. The same team can handle both. That means fewer resources devoted to completing the same amount of work, and more seamless workflows across a team.
What does it do?
LiveView Native uses Phoenix to serve mobile native and web application views, but also to serve as the server-side framework. Now everything can be developed with the inherent scalability, concurrency, and reliability benefits that come with Elixir.
Phoenix serving your web views, your mobile native views, and acting as your server-side framework creates an even more cohesive and single-stack team.
The result is a framework that allows developers to create a lightweight application functionalities and complex capabilities that previously would have required significant JavaScript support.
Conclusion
LiveView Native is the next step in seamless application development for Elixir. It empowers small teams to do more and gives them the full range of Elixir’s benefits.
Read up on more of our R&D work—including two more of our newest projects, Beacon and Firefly—on our blog, and keep up with the latest from the DockYard team by following us on Twitter and LinkedIn and subscribing to our newsletter.
