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 what controllers are both within and outside the context of a simple application. We then learned how Phoenix implements its controllers by utilizing Plug and how the entire request-response cycle, right from the router to the controllers, is powered by Plug. Taking that philosophy, we built our own controller interface and tested an example controller with both goldcrest_http_server and cowboy. To make our controller functionality more complete, we added the ability to redirect a request to another route by learning how redirects actually work in the context of a web browser. We finally wrapped up by using the Plug.Test module to test our controller without having to start our HTTP server.

Similar to previous chapters, we didn’t cover all the functions that should be added to the Goldcrest.Controller module to save time. We also didn’t write the render/3 implementation for HTML pages because we will cover that in a future chapter...