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

Compile-time callbacks

Elixir also provides a mechanism to hook into the compilation of a module and perform tasks. These tasks can range from something as simple as logging to something as complex as injecting behavior.

These callbacks can be registered by using special reserved module attributes, but they are invoked depending on their type. There are three types of compile-time callbacks:

  • @before_compile
  • @after_compile
  • @on_definition

Before compile

A callback registered using the @before_compile module attribute is registered as a before compile callback. As the name suggests, this callback is invoked right before the module is finished compiling.

Since this callback is invoked after all the functions in the module are defined, it has access to the module’s functions and its attributes.

The callback can be either a function or a macro, but it needs to be defined in a different module outside of the current module, since it hasn’t...