Updates
From the time I wrote part 1
of this short series, Atom has gained a new Elixir plugin based on Samuel Tonini’s Alchemist Server.
From the Emacs plugin, it inherits all the most notable features such as
autocomplete, jump to definition/documentation for the function/module under
the cursor, quote/unquote code and interactive macro expansion.
A feature reference along with some screenshots can be found at the atom-elixir page.
It also looks pretty good.
The assets pipeline
Assets pipelines are one of the most important features in modern web frameworks.
When working on this task, Phoenix developers have proven that they value
pragmatism over purity and have chosen to base their implementation on Brunch, a Node.js build tool that takes care of everything
related to assets management.
This choice has probably saved man-years of work, that would have inevitably delayed the release of a fully working pipeline system.
A very common counter argument is that this adds node as a dependency, but I
think it’s a negligible inconvenient, node is most probably already present on
the majority of developers machines.