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

Working with HTML and Embedded Elixir

In the previous chapter, we learned how to leverage plugs to implement controllers and routers for our web framework. We were able to receive an HTTP request from our web server and, using our controllers, respond with HTML content. However, the HTML content was always static. In order to support server-side rendering of HTML in a more dynamic way, we need the ability to define HTML templates that have parts that can be dynamically evaluated right before responding. Rails does this using HTML files embedded with Ruby code, which is dynamically evaluated right before the response. Phoenix, before version 1.6, used a similar strategy using the EEx package.

In this chapter, we will dig into the EEx library and learn how to use its API. We will learn how it works and how it can be used to add templating abilities to our server-side rendered HTML responses.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is EEx?
  • How to use...