Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Chapter 4. Powered by Erlang/OTP

As we saw in the previous chapter, a common idiom, also seen in Erlang, is to spawn processes to keep state and concurrently perform computations whose side effects may be retrieved by some means afterwards. This approach gives you endless possibilities but is more verbose and prone to errors, given it requires you to build on top of the existing basic primitives from the get-go.

To help with the previous issue, the Erlang creators decided to create higher-level abstractions for some common use cases and collected the recommended design principles to apply when writing Erlang projects. Thus, a set of libraries named Open Telecom Platform (OTP) was born.

In this chapter, we will delve into some of those incredibly useful OTP behaviours that Elixir inherited from Erlang, such as GenServer, and some of the abstractions provided by Elixir on top of those, such as Agent, Task, and Registry. Besides these behaviours, we will analyze the Erlang Term Storage (ETS)...