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 a plug

A plug takes two forms: a function plug and a module plug.

A function plug simply takes a connection with a set of options as a keyword list and returns a new connection. For example, the following Plug function just takes a connection, checks if it is authorized, and returns a halted connection if it is not:

import Plug.Conn
def authorization_plug(conn, opts) do
  if is_authorized?(conn) do
    conn
  else
    conn
    |> put_resp_content_type("text/plain")
    |> put_status(401)
    |> halt()
  end
end

Function plugs like this one are great for one-time use with not many use cases. However, if you want a plug to be called on multiple pipelines or to be part of a supervision tree, it’s better to use a module plug.

A Plug module can be used to transform a connection struct based on the given options and...