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 are controllers?

A controller is the component of a web application that accepts input and controls the flow of requests. This generally includes accepting a specific content type, authenticating, matching request parameters, and so on.

In an MVC framework, a controller is generally used as an entry point to the web application. The controller first matches a request based on its parameters (such as request method, route, and so on), and uses the model layer to fetch any requested data. Finally, it uses the views to present the data in a consumable way. In many modern MVC frameworks such as Phoenix, there also exists an additional component, the router, which takes on the responsibility of matching an incoming request to a controller for further handling.

The request-response cycle described is better shown in the following diagram:

Figure 4.1 – The MVC flow

Now that you’ve looked at a brief overview of controllers in general,...