Legacy Rails + Phoenix apps

June 3, 2025

Marli Baumann gave us a glimpse into how her company maintains a legacy Rails app while developing a complementary Phoenix (Elixir) app.

Marli expanded our horizons on what’s possible:

• Even in the earliest versions of Rails, it was possible to dynamically render parts of a page. A lot of what Hotwire does now is not essentially new; it’s just more built into the framework.
• It’s possible for two apps (Rails and Phoenix) to connect to each other’s database.
• It’s possible to hand-roll a cron-based background job scheduler.