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

Technical requirements

The best way to work through this chapter is by following along with the code on your computer. So, having a computer with Elixir and Erlang ready to go would be ideal. I recommend using a version manager such as asdf to install Elixir 1.11.x and Erlang 23.2.x, to get similar results as the code written in the book. We will also be using an HTTP client such as cURL or Wget to make HTTP requests to our server, and a web browser to render HTML responses.

Although most of the code in this chapter is relatively simple, basic knowledge of Elixir and/or Erlang would also come in handy. It will allow you to get more out of this chapter while setting the foundation for other chapters.

Since most of this chapter isn’t coding, you can also choose to read without coding, but the same doesn’t apply to other chapters.

The code examples for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Build-Your-Own-Web-Framework-in-Elixir/tree/main/chapter_01