April 2021 Summaries

The author describes their experience building a fully distributed, clustered, privately networked, global game server system using Elixir and the Phoenix LiveView feature. They emphasize that they didn't need to build a JavaScript front-end or an API for transferring data between the front-end and back-end. Instead, they used Phoenix.PubSub and Horde library for process registry. The author also highlights the benefits of hosting their application on Fly.io, which provides private networked connections and multi-region support. They conclude by expressing satisfaction with the results and encouraging others to build more interesting games using this system.

Fly.io is a platform that takes container images and runs them on hardware around the world. It uses OCI images, which are simple stacks of tarballs representing layers in a Docker container. The company has built its own repository server to manage containers for different organizations and uses Firecracker as a VMM engine to run containers as VMs. Fly.io also offers an orchestration system that plugs into their API, allowing users to deploy applications globally on their Rust-powered anycast proxy network in under 10 minutes.

The article discusses the use of LiveView, a feature in Phoenix (a Rails-on-Elixir framework), to create real-time user experiences in web applications. It explains how HTML-over-websockets implementation works and highlights its benefits for server initiated changes. However, it also points out that latency can be an issue when users start interacting with the application. The article suggests three strategies to improve interaction response times: predicting new state client side, decreasing round trip time, and showing a loading indicator. It emphasizes the importance of moving app processes closer to users for faster responses and mentions how Fly.io can help deploy applications globally.