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

Responding over a TCP socket using :gen_tcp

Now that we know how to use :gen_tcp to initiate a TCP/IP connection, the next step is to respond using that connection. In order to respond to a request, we will be using the :gen_tcp.send/2 function.

The :gen_tcp.send/2 function allows us to send I/O data (generally string) on a connection socket. It doesn’t support send timeout, so it only takes a connection socket and data that needs to be sent. We can use the connection socket returned by the :gen_tcp.accept/1 call in the previous section to send an HTTP response.

In order to send data over a connection socket, let’s restructure our ExperimentServer module:

experiment_server.exs

defmodule ExperimentServer do
  require Logger
  def start(port) do
    listener_options = [
    active: false,
    packet: :http_bin,
    reuseaddr: true
  ]
   ...