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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to leverage the Plug library to define a router to route incoming requests to a specific handler. We also learned about the Plug philosophy and why using Plug for web applications makes sense. We then used Plug.Conn.Adapter behavior to define an adapter for the HTTP server we defined in the previous chapter. Finally, we wrapped up by defining a cleaner interface for using the plug.

In this chapter, we didn’t define all the implementations for callbacks defined in the Plug.Conn.Adapter module. This was done to save time. We also didn’t write automated tests for this chapter because most of what we wrote can be tested similar to how HTTP servers were defined in previous chapters. We do intend on writing a better testing interface for our HTTP server, but we will do that in the DSL design part of this book.

In the next chapter, we will use our knowledge of Plug to build a controller interface to manage the flow of an incoming...