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

Exploring the client-server architecture

In the context of HTTP servers, clients generally mean the web browsers that enable end users to read the information being served, whereas servers mean long-running processes that serve information in the form of documents to those clients. These documents are most commonly written in HTML and are used as a means of communication between the client and the server. Clients are responsible for enabling the end user to send a request to the server and display the response from the server. Browsers allow the users to retrieve and display information without requiring any knowledge of HTML or web servers, by just providing an address (the URL).

At a given time, many clients can access a server’s information. This puts the burden of scaling on the servers as they need to be designed with the ability to respond to multiple requests within an acceptable period of time. Now that we understand a web server’s primary goal, let’s move on to the protocol that enables communication between web servers: HTTP.