State

[kitallis]

Hi!

I'm new to Phoenix/Elixir and I watched your talk on Presence and went through the code. I'm curious about the split of the state here:

The currently selected programming lanuage and tracked and broadcast with the help of the ChallengeChannel.Monitor module which leverages GenServer to store the language in a "channel state".

&

The tracking of which user is currently typing is managed by the ChallengePresence module. This module leverages PhoenixPresence to track user state in the channel and expose it to all subscribing clients.

I'm building a little game of my own and I discovered Presence a bit too late in the day.

The way I've modeled it is the following:

1. HTTP endpoints that bootstrap a GenServer (with Game state) driven by a cljs frontend.
2. All post-joining/creating communication happens over channels within the game that communicate with that GenServer to update the state.

My question is,

Now that I've done all this, I feel like most of it could be better done through Presence, but I'm still uncertain. I'm curious why you chose to split your challenge state in a GenServer and more ephemeral state in the Presence?