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

Interactive applications using channels


Up to this point, we've been exploring how to use Phoenix to build traditional web applications, where the server receives a request and returns a response. Requests are isolated from one another, and it is the responsibility of the server to keep the state of the conversation with each client. This has been the way most web applications are built because it allows us to scale them easily. Since each request is stateless, the server can always treat them as a new one, giving us the ability to horizontally scale our applications.

In this section, we'll focus on adding channels to our application, which, as we'll see during this chapter, significantly simplifies the implementation of interactive applications. Instead of the traditional request/response flow we've already described (seen throughout this chapter), when using channels we have a permanent connection between the client and the server, which is only closed when either one exits or crashes....