Building Conversational Web APIs with Phoenix Channels

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Building Conversational Web APIs with Phoenix Channels
Nicholas Scheurich from GridPoint shares insights into leveraging Phoenix Channels for building a real-time, stateful web API, providing an alternative to standard REST or GraphQL APIs. He outlines the benefits of Phoenix Channels, such as reducing network traffic and offering a persistent full-duplex connection that enables a more efficient, conversational interaction pattern between clients and servers. These channels facilitate a stateful conversation where the server maintains context, eliminating repetitive data exchanges. Nicholas explains how their team at GridPoint employed Phoenix Channels to deploy a web API that supports a native mobile application, emphasizing the importance of a shared vocabulary and thinking in terms of conversations to fully exploit the potential of full-duplex communication. The talk also introduces a new Elixir library designed to assist developers in adopting a Channel-based API approach and discusses various pro tips, including embracing paradigm shifts and ensuring message and payload validity for seamless serialization to JSON.

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