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

What is Plug?

Plug is an Elixir module that allows us to easily define the specifications of a web application. If you are from the Ruby world, you can think of Plug as somewhat like Rack, which allows us to define middleware to read and transform requests/responses in a web application.

Plug allows us to add middleware-like behavior by defining a set of composable operations on a connection struct, Plug.Conn. This allows us to define behavior in the form of a plug, which can transform the attributes of a Conn. Unlike in Rack, Conn contains information related to both the request and the response. This, along with Elixir’s |> operator, allows us to define the entire request-response cycle in a single pipeline of composable operations:

Figure 3.1 – Plug life cycle