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?

Similar to Chapter 9, we will use metaprogramming here to wrap an already existing implementation of our router and router pipeline around a digestible and idiomatic interface.

Metaprogramming is especially useful in the case of the router modules because, currently, the router module is the least readable and most boilerplate-heavy of all components in Goldcrest. We also want our router to work well with all the controllers and views, so it puts an added burden on developers to make sure all the components are hooked up correctly. Therefore, by taking away the responsibility of managing that boilerplate code, we will significantly improve the developer experience of building a router using Goldcrest.

Now that we understand why the Goldcrest router is a good candidate for metaprogramming, let’s start by defining the requirements for the router DSL.