DataTables for React: APIs in Phoenix and Rails

A while ago I published redux-remote-datatable. It's a React and Redux-based table for serverside-processed data, and it looks like this:

project example

At the request of a GitHub user, I added an example implementation of the API written in Ruby on Rails. You can find that here. This is the server I used to capture the above gif.

Over the weekend I made another API implementation in an effort to showcase the ease of switching backend services for the component and to learn a new framework. I chose Phoenix (Elixir), and the result can be found here. Both this and the Rails project are fully dockerized and utilize docker-compose.

I really enjoyed my development experience in Phoenix. Rails knowledge ports easily to the new framework and I find myself being fairly productive in it already. In terms of performance, I can only speak to development but I recorded 3x faster speeds with Phoenix, with a page for the table rendering in 200ms compared to Rail's 600ms. This made the datatable noticably snappier.

By the way, props to the congress-legislators GitHub project which the seeds for both APIs depend on.

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