I struggled with Ecto. It seemed too complex. I missed find_by_sql and the scopes of ActiveRecord. But once I went past the initial learning curve Ecto is a seriously well designed library. I have not written a single sql query by hand. Now I feel find_by_sql is an anti-pattern as I was mixing sql with ORM.

Once your database becomes sufficiently complex you start writing a lot more sql.

ActiveRecord's way of chaining scopes to combine multiple scopes is brittle. You can't customize the conditions. Ecto solves this by giving you composability. You can build on top of your earlier commands. If you combine this with pattern matching in the functions or Enum.reduce you have an extremely powerful and a flexible query engine.

Ecto also relies on the strengths of underlying database engine rather than treating it as a black box. If you are dealing with 100s of tables Rails way of polymorphic design doesn't give you referential integrity. I like Ecto's recommendations: https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/polymorphic-associations-with-many-t...

Probably there's no one in the Elixir community with enough know how to build a Devise-alike lib, it's what it is.

Uh, I shouldn't have to point this out but Elixir was created by the people behind devise...

Here a good blog post on this exact topic

https://dashbit.co/blog/a-new-authentication-solution-for-ph...

The problem with the internet is that you can't markdown irony...

ahah sorry about that! I merely wanted to add that to the conversation but I should've replied to the previous message.

Is this a joke based on the fact that the same person created Elixir as Devise?

Jose Valim, the creator and primary author of Elixir, actually wrote Devise.

Jose Valim, creator Elixir, was one of the core developers of Devise...

That's the joke

I've been able to drop in pow with ease and have everything I would have gotten from devise.

That said, the community is moving towards phx_gen_auth which jose himself wrote and will come out of the box with 1.6