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 modern web frameworks such as Rails and Phoenix define a way to hook into a request from a controller, check for certain conditions, and in some cases, halt the request pipeline. We then learned about the details of the Plug.Builder module, how to implement it, and how we can use it to add that feature into our controller.

After learning how to test our Plug.Builder module, we learned how to use the overridable call/2 function to define a fallback plug for a controller action. In this way, we can standardize the error handling across many controllers, allowing developers to focus on the happy path while writing the controllers.

Now that we have a working set of controllers and routers for our web framework, we will focus on adding views and HTML templates in a dynamic, server-rendered manner in the next chapter.