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

Property-based testing


We will conclude this chapter by talking about an exciting new way of testing: property-based testing. We say new because this type of testing has been used for a long time in the Erlang and Haskell communities (and possibly others), and is now making its way into the Elixir community. At the time of this writing, there are strong indications that property-based testing will be part of the core of Elixir, supposedly shipping with Elixir in version 1.7. Particularly, the library that we'll be using in our examples later on (stream_data) will be merged to Elixir itself. It's still unclear how this will be done, and if the API of the library will change. Nevertheless, by reading this and checking out the examples, you'll already be capable of entering this new way of testing, even if in the future things are done differently.

 

Before moving on to the examples, we need to discuss the purpose and characteristics of property-based tests. Contrary to unit tests where we, the...