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

Creating a domain-specific language


You may recall the chapter where we used GenStage to implement our upload and download pipelines. This enabled us to define each step role, and the GenStage behaviour would handle the subscription and message-passing logic between steps, ensuring that no step would get boggled with too many events.

We now want to improve on what we accomplished previously, by streamlining the pipeline and steps definition. To make this happen, we will create our very own Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to help define GenStage-based pipelines, with the help of some interesting macro tools. This will allow us to remove the boilerplate from our pipeline definitions and improve their expressiveness.

Note

Given that, with macros, we are writing code that will generate code for us, it is a good tactic to, at least in the beginning, check the final generated code whenever you change the code-generation logic. Remember that Macro.to_string/1 gives you the pretty string representation...