for the lazy: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix
[1] https://quilljs.com/ [2] https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/ [3] https://firebase.google.com/ [4] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir
https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug
$ mix phoenix.new my_app
$ mix phoenix.server
It may be worth asking josevalim and chrismccord in #elixir-lang for tips on setting it up, since they obviously must know how to set up cowboy pretty well to build a system on top of it.
I think Erlang and things like cowboy and OTP are absolutely amazing for the web, but Elixir has made things 100x easier to get up and running with them.
I'm a newbie but I've been impressed by the tooling so far. And once you change how you think about everything the learning curve isn't too bad. =)
It has a rails-y framework that I haven't heard much about (and nothing particularly bad):
Another rising technology with a similar name. This phoenix is set to be the Rails for Elixir
https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix\nhttp://www.confreaks.com/videos/4132-elixirconf2014-rise-of-...
I've worked on a couple projects in Elixir already. I do still like Ruby/Rails for rendering HTML (there's years of hard work in making that an easy thing to do in Rails), so a common web app that I create lately will be Rails as a very thing wrapper around the database for rendering HTML and then an Elixir component for background jobs and WebSockets.
That said, a ton of great work is going into Phoenix[0] and I think it's very close to being suitable for both rendering HTML and WebSockets. On my next project I'll probably try and just use Phoenix entirely.
One thing I constantly keep in mind when programming in Elixir is that, using it in the same way you would use Python is a waste. For example, when I use Python, I'm not typically thinking of concurrency (outside of, "how many gunicorn workers will I need?"), because of the situation with concurrency in Python. Using Elixir (or Erlang), you really aren't taking full advantage of the language/runtime/VM if you don't take concurrency into account. If all you want to do is a little string munging, you can do it in Elixir, but it is probably not the best tool for the job.
The Mix & OTP guides available on elixir-lang.org are great, but if you want more information on OTP, the OTP chapters in "Learn you some Erlang"[2] are wonderful. You will have to do some translation from Erlang syntax to Elixir, but it is a great way to learn how to think concurrency.