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 an HTTP Server in Elixir

After learning the basics of a web server and taking a deeper look into Cowboy in the previous chapter, in this chapter, we will see how to build an HTTP server in Elixir. In order to build the HTTP server, we will leverage Erlang’s :gen_tcp module. Using that module, we will create a TCP/IP connection between the client and the server, just like in Cowboy. We will then write a configurable web server package that will allow other apps to provide their own handlers to respond with. We will also be testing our HTTP server thoroughly using unit tests and a helper application. We will close up by making our HTTP server concurrent.

After reading through this chapter, you will be able to build an HTTP server from scratch using Elixir and have a better understanding of how TCP works to facilitate communication using sockets. We will be covering the following topics:

  • Listening over a TCP socket using :gen_tcp
  • Responding over a TCP socket...