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

Summary

In this chapter, we first looked at our use case and evaluated whether it makes sense to use metaprogramming here. Since we’re building a DSL with clear requirements and proper implementation already done, it was an easy choice to make the interface cleaner by adding a layer of metaprogramming.

Then, we designed our DSL based on what would provide the best experience for developers using our project. Once we had the requirements and design ready, we used the constructs of metaprogramming we learned in Chapter 8 to build DSLs for both Controller and View.

Just as we learned in Chapter 8, building a DSL is only half a job done. We proceeded to add introspective features and test helpers to allow for easier adoption, testing, maintenance, and debugging. We also updated the web app from Chapter 7 to work with the new DSL and ensured everything worked the way we expected it to.

Now that we have built a DSL for our Controller and View modules, the book’s last...