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

Adding Controller Plugs and Action Fallback

In the last chapter, we built a framework to write a controller and wrapped it inside the Goldcrest.Controller module. In this chapter, we will learn about extending the functionality of our controllers by intercepting an incoming request and calling specific plugs on it based on the controller’s definition before letting the controller’s actions handle that request. This will give developers the means to add better control of the request flow while keeping their controller code simple and digestible. We will learn how to use the Plug.Builder module to build a pipeline of plugs in a controller. We will then learn how to apply a pipeline of plugs to an action and how to define a fallback controller to capture any errors.

By the end of the chapter, you will understand Plug.Builder enough to build complex plug pipelines without needing Phoenix or any other libraries other than Plug itself. You will also learn how Phoenix implements...