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

Building the Router DSL

In this chapter, we will continue using the metaprogramming skills learned in Chapter 8 to make Goldcrest easier to use and adopt. In the previous chapter, we used metaprogramming to create a DSL around our controller and view modules. Doing this eliminated a lot of boilerplate code while significantly increasing the readability of those modules. We also added reflections and test helpers to allow us to test and debug those modules well. In this chapter, we will do the same for the router module. Similar to Chapter 9, we will start by defining the requirements for our router interface, see why metaprogramming makes sense for this use case, and finally, build the DSL along with high reflectivity and testability.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Designing the DSL for routers based on requirements
  • Using Elixir’s pillars of metaprogramming to build the router DSL
  • Adding reflections to make it easier to debug and test...