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

Defining Web Application Specifications Using Plug

In the previous chapters, we took a deep dive into Cowboy to learn about some of its fundamentals. Then, using that knowledge, we built a web server using :gen_tcp. However, in both those chapters, we didn’t deal with any sort of complex route matching or other request formats. We will now learn how to accomplish that using the Plug package. In this chapter, we will learn how Plug works, understand some of its main components, and how we can use them to make our web server more usable.

By the end of this chapter, you will know the ins and outs of the Plug package and how Plug enables us to use Cowboy efficiently. You will also learn how to make Plug work with the HTTP server we built in the previous chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Philosophy of Plug
  • Components of Plug
  • The Plug.Conn struct
  • What happens when you send a response using Plug?
  • Function plugs and module plugs...