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

Listening over a TCP socket using :gen_tcp

Cowboy uses Ranch to create and manage a TCP connection, but in our web server, we will be using the :gen_tcp module. This module allows two entities to communicate using TCP/IP sockets and is shipped as a part of Erlang’s Open Telecom Platform (OTP).

We need to first listen on a TCP/IP port and accept requests on a TCP socket. Once the request is processed and a response is sent, we also need to close the connection and socket.

Here are the functions we will be using:

  • :gen_tcp.listen/2: Accepts a listening port and server options. Creates a listening socket that listens on a given TCP/IP port.
  • :gen_tcp.accept/2: Accepts a listening socket returned by :gen_tcp.listen/2 and a timeout, which defaults to infinity. This function creates another socket that represents a connection between the server and the client. This socket is used to send a response to the client from the server. Since web servers are long-running processes...