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 defined the desired DSL for our router module. We also understood why we use metaprogramming here, similar to the previous chapter.

Then, we took a look at the state of our router before this chapter and identified the lines that could be moved out of the router to the DSL. We started to build our DSL by moving all the plug calls to the __using__/1 macro in Goldcrest.Router. We then found a way to add a generic match clause to get a default 404 response. We made the use statement dynamic by allowing it to pass options to the Plug.Parsers call as part of the use call.

We then worked on adding reflections and introspective features to the router DSL, similar to what we did in Chapter 9 for controllers and views. We also defined helper functions and helper modules that allow us to reference a path by using a controller and action, similar to Phoenix. Finally, we added test helpers along with an example test for a router.

This concludes our minimal...