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

Why use metaprogramming here?

Based on what we learned in Chapter 8, we should use metaprogramming only after trying to implement our solution without using any metaprogramming. We spent Chapter 1 to Chapter 7 learning how to build a web framework without metaprogramming, so now it’s a good time to consider whether or not we should use it.

Here are the reasons why we should use metaprogramming for Goldcrest:

  • We will be building DSLs that will be used in multiple places, by multiple controllers that use Goldcrest. This will allow us to standardize how controllers and views behave in Goldcrest.
  • We have a clear set of requirements that we don’t anticipate changing very often. This allows us to build a stable DSL for the Goldcrest controllers and views.
  • Our implementation without a DSL is too complex to read when developers just need to make simple changes to define a controller. That’s a clear indication that this is a great candidate to build a...