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

Macros cheat sheet


Metaprogramming may feel daunting at first. We're doing a lot even before compilation starts, and the errors and warnings we get may seem cryptic sometimes. Having a clear end goal on your mind, and performing small iterations, will allow you to get comfortable with the quote/2 and unquote/1 dance and let you accomplish some neat macro-based features.

What follows is a brief compilation of the main concepts and tools we applied, which you can now incorporate in your tool belt:

  • The abstract syntax tree of any expression, also called a quoted representation, is a nested structure of three element tuples that the compiler knows how to convert into BEAM bytecode. You can get this quoted representation by using the quote/2 macro.
  • Inside a quote/1 block, the compiler is generating the quoted representation of each statement. When it finds an unquote/1, it stops the AST generation and evaluates and injects the value it gets.
  • The bind_quoted option of the quote/2 macro helps you to...