It's like Rails except that there's much more resources for Rails to find if you made a mistake in the DSL
I think it helped that at the time I was trying to build some pretty advanced filtering functionality using Ecto and was having a pretty tough time. While searching for solutions I saw a few mentions of Ash and that it could solve the problem out of the box.
After a few days of experiments, I found that it was able to do the filtering I wanted out of the box and was even more functional than what I was trying to build.
For reference, I was trying to add some tagging functionality to a resource and I wanted to be able to filter by that tag, including multiple tags. Can I do that in Ecto? Of course, but Ash provided that out of the box after modeling the resource.
As an example, I wanted to add support for adding tags to a resource, and support filtering for the resource by the tag, and I wanted to be able to do this filtering both through Elixir functions as well as GraphQL.
Can I do this with Ecto? Absolutely, but I'd have to build it all myself.
With Ash, I created a `Tag` and `Tagging` resource, adding a `many_to_many` block on my resource, marked it as public. Then I added the `AshGraphql.Resource` extension to my `Tag` resource, marked it as filterable and I was done.
Now I can filter and sort by tags, filter by where tags _don't_ exist and more. I didn't have to do anything other than model my domain, and Ash took care of the rest for me. Not only that, but it probably did a lot of things for me that I probably wouldn't have thought of, such as supporting multi-tenancy, policies and more.
It really is a lovely tool, I can't say enough good things about it.
Does it have a learning curve? Absolutely! Is it worth overcoming it? Again, absolutely!
policy action(:invite_user) do
forbid_unless actor_attribute_equals(:role, :admin)
authorize_if {App.Checks.OnlyAllowedRoles, roles: [:student, :parent]}
end
Source: Has worked on million-line Ruby on Rails codebase
I wish Elixir had more mindshare beside just LiveView and "real time" type functionality. Even building a GraphQL/JSON endpoint without real-time requirements, the functional nature (no side effects), pattern matching and ruby inspired syntax makes writing plain old JSON controllers a joy.
While Elixir might not have a package for every use case under the sun, the low level primitives are there.