Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Distributed computing with Elixir


Now that we've had our obligatory introduction to distributed computing and networking, we can start to see how and what Elixir and OTP bring to the table for creating distributed applications. Again, Elixir and OTP won't solve the problems we've mentioned, but the design around Elixir and OTP will put us in a really good position for handling failures in our applications and systems.

OTP nodes

So far, I've used the term node pretty loosely. Certainly, nodes have many meanings in certain contexts. In computing, node could refer to an element in a tree, a graph, a network, a server, and so on. In terms of OTP, a node refers to an Erlang VM. There can be as many OTP nodes on a single computer as allowed by the resources of the machine. OTP nodes can be hosted across several machines in the same network. OTP nodes can even be geographically distributed, although it's not recommended.

The choices of how to distribute OTP nodes will usually be a choice of the application...