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

Controller and View DSL

In this chapter, we will use the metaprogramming skills learned in the previous chapter to make our controller and view modules easier to read and extend. We will first define the requirements for our interface, understand why we need metaprogramming, and build an idiomatic interface to properly define future controllers and views.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Understanding why it makes sense to use metaprogramming here
  • Designing the DSL for controllers based on requirements
  • Using concepts covered in the previous chapter to build a DSL for controllers
  • Adding reflections to make it easier to debug and test the controller DSL
  • Making plug calls more introspective and reflective
  • Designing and building the DSL for views
  • Adding reflections to make it easier to debug and test the view DSL
  • Building an app to test out the new DSLs
  • Creating test helper modules to make it easier to test the DSLs

At...