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


In the process of adding a web layer to our application, we covered a lot of ground in this chapter. Let's run through the most important points in this chapter:

  • Phoenix builds upon the Plug specification, which has two forms: module and function plugs. Both of them take a connection and return a connection, possibly modifying it before returning.
  • An endpoint is the boundary where all requests to our web application start, and by default it contains a list of plugs that run for every request.
  • Using macros, routers in Phoenix compile down to efficient pattern matching. Besides defining routes, we can create pipelines in the router, which are a group of plugs that run sequentially.
  • Controller actions are functions that receive two arguments: the connection and the parameters of the request. Usually, we aim to keep our controller code as small as possible, calling some other module and rendering a view based on its response.
  • Views are plain modules with rendering functions. Templates are...