Book Image

Build Your Own Web Framework in Elixir

By : Aditya Iyengar
Book Image

Build Your Own Web Framework in Elixir

By: Aditya Iyengar

Overview of this book

Elixir's functional nature and metaprogramming capabilities make it an ideal language for building web frameworks, with Phoenix being the most ubiquitous framework in the Elixir ecosystem and a popular choice for companies seeking scalable web-based products. With an ever-increasing demand for Elixir engineers, developers can accelerate their careers by learning Elixir and the Phoenix web framework. With Build Your Own Web Framework in Elixir, you’ll start by exploring the fundamental concepts of web development using Elixir. You'll learn how to build a robust web server and create a router to direct incoming requests to the correct controller. Then, you'll learn to dispatch requests to controllers to respond with clean, semantic HTML, and explore the power of Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) and metaprogramming in Elixir. You'll develop a deep understanding of Elixir's unique syntax and semantics, allowing you to optimize your code for performance and maintainability. Finally, you'll discover how to effectively test each component of your application for accuracy and performance. By the end of this book, you'll have a thorough understanding of how Elixir components are implemented within Phoenix, and how to leverage its powerful features to build robust web applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Web Server Fundamentals
4
Part 2: Router, Controller, and View
10
Part 3: DSL Design

Metaprogramming in Elixir

In Elixir, metaprogramming is mostly used as a way to extend the language’s functionality and design DSL to make code more readable and digestible. However, unlike many other metaprogrammable languages, Elixir metaprogramming is quite restrictive. There are some safety mechanisms baked into Elixir’s core library to prevent developers from doing something that could easily break the language. For example, you cannot define a function in a module after it has already been defined. We will cover more such mechanisms later in this chapter.

Metaprogramming in Elixir revolves around three main pillars:

  • Quoted literals: The Elixir representation of an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of an Elixir program
  • Dynamic code injection: Injecting behavior into existing code dynamically
  • Compile-time callbacks: Updating a module or the behavior of a function before or after its elements are defined

We will first start by understanding how an...