alt Hacker NewsThis is not a new problem. It is exactly what a web application framework like, e.g. django has been handling for one and a half decades.
What does it do that django doesn't?
A lot of competitors to django have also fallen behind because they either railroad you too much (e.g. by making immutable assumptions about how you want authentication to work which often end up being faulty) or go too far in the other direction and require an excess of boilerplate. This is a very subtle and tricky trade off that most newcomers to the space fail badly at.
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Unlike Django, Ash is not a web framework, it’s an *application* framework.
One way to think of it is that it’s a flexible and extensible domain modelling language that also happens to derive an Elixir application which can be called from Phoenix web UI (or something else like an API, a terminal UI or even an MCP server.
I’d consider Phoenix to be like Flask. Ash fills the gap that brings Phoenix up to feature parity with a batteries included framework like Django.
Ash Admin (Django admin), Ash Resource & Domain (Django models & ORM), Ash JSON (Django Rest Framework), Ash Auth (Django Allauth), Ash Phoenix (Django Forms), Ash policies (Django permissions)
But you aren’t required to use Phoenix with an Ash project. Ash will happily work as a standalone CLI, terminal app or some other Elixir web framework that comes out tomorrow.