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

Testing the HTTP server

Now that we have all the ingredients to write an HTTP server, it’s time to write some tests. I will only cover some necessary tests in this chapter. If you are curious about which other tests we could write, feel free to check out the code for goldcrest_http_server, linked in the book’s GitHub repository.

In order to test our HTTP server, we will first need to make two changes to the mix.exs file, as follows:

  • Add Finch to the list of dependencies: This allows us to make HTTP calls to our server’s endpoints.
  • Update elixirc_paths: This updates the list of paths that need to be compiled as part of the project. Moreover, by defining those paths based on the Mix environment, Mix allows us to compile support modules in the test environment, one of which would be a TestResponder module.

Let’s go ahead and make these changes:

mix.exs

defmoduleGoldcrestHttpServer.MixProject do
  use Mix.Project
 ...