Real-Time Phoenix

The Power of Acceptance Testing

It is a challenge to write and run real-time systems, although Phoenix handles many of the hard parts. Real-time systems use persistent connections to optimize the speed and efficiency of sending data to clients. As we covered in ​Design for Unreliable Connections​, persistent connections are less forgiving than traditional web requests and require additional code to cover scenarios that can happen to users.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why this is the case and how acceptance tests can help us gain confidence in our application. Acceptance tests are tests that use the entire application stack, from browser to server. They can be manual or automated, which we’ll cover later in this chapter. We can recreate ...