Book Image

Crystal Programming

By : George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal
Book Image

Crystal Programming

By: George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal

Overview of this book

Crystal is a programming language with a concise and user-friendly syntax, along with a seamless system and a performant core, reaching C-like speed. This book will help you gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of Crystal and show you how to apply them to create various types of applications. This book comes packed with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples. You'll learn how to use Crystal’s features to create complex and organized projects relying on OOP and its most common design patterns. As you progress, you'll gain a solid understanding of both the basic and advanced features of Crystal. This will enable you to build any application, including command-line interface (CLI) programs and web applications using IOs, concurrency and C bindings, HTTP servers, and the JSON API. By the end of this programming book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to use Crystal programming for building and understanding any application you come across.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
5
Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
10
Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
13
Part 4: Metaprogramming
18
Part 5: Supporting Tools

Chapter 9: Creating a Web Application with Athena

Crystal's similarities with Ruby have made it quite popular as a web-based language hoping to entice some Ruby on Rails, among other frameworks, users to make the switch to Crystal. Crystal boasts quite a few popular frameworks, from simple routers to full stack, and everything in between. In this chapter, we are going to walk through how to create an application using one of these frameworks in the Crystal ecosystem called Athena Framework. While we will be making heavy use of this framework, we will also cover more general topics that can be leveraged irrespective of what framework you ultimately decide upon. By the end of the chapter, we will have covered the following topics:

  • Understanding Athena's architecture
  • Getting started with Athena
  • Implementing database interactions
  • Leveraging content negotiation