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

Summary


We accomplished a lot throughout this chapter. Let's look back at the main topics that we covered:

  • The Elixir abstract syntax tree consists of a tree-like data structure composed of nested three-element tuples representing your code. This data structure can be manipulated using the quote/2 andunquote/1constructs and is also called a quoted expression.
  • By default, Elixir enforces a macro hygiene rule that doesn't allow us to impinge into the caller module, unless we specifically want to.
  • Macros are functions whose arguments are quoted before reaching the function body and have to return valid quoted expressions as well. Macros are expanded right before compile time.
  • The use and __using__/1 macros let the macro module inject code into the caller module. We used these constructs to register a @time_unit module attribute in the caller module, so we could control the time units used by the defchrono/2 macro.
  • We created a domain-specific language to streamline the definition of parallel GenStage...