Introduction

This section will create an admin-facing dashboard that will show real-time information about all the current shoppers on the website. We’ll learn about and use Phoenix Tracker and Presence along the way.

Phoenix Tracker

The distributed state is a challenging problem. Variations in time and network partitions are just some of the challenges we’ll face when writing a distributed system. Phoenix Tracker makes distributing a list of processes and metadata about each process an easy endeavor. Tracker uses an advanced data structure to distribute states across a cluster efficiently and accurately, which allows us to know how many Channels are connected currently. This is a complex problem to tackle appropriately, but Tracker handles it for us!

We’ll start this section by going over the plan for our admin dashboard. The most crucial feature we’ll implement in this section is the active shopper list. This will show a store admin the ...