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

Testing with Floki

In this section, we will update our controller test written in the previous section to test HTML elements returned by the response body. This will allow us to better ensure that the final HTML rendered by the controller is correct. In order to do this, we will use floki.

Floki is an HTML parser written purely in Elixir. With floki, we can parse an HTML string into a struct and search for notes using HTML and CSS selectors. It’s a great tool to programmatically interpret HTML in Elixir, such as web scraping. One of its other common uses is to test server-side rendered HTML in Phoenix and other Elixir web applications.

Let’s start by adding floki to the mix.exs dependencies:

mix.exs

defmodule ExampleServerHtmlEex.MixProject do
  # ..
  defp deps do
    [
      {:goldcrest, "~> 0.0.1"},
      {:floki, ">= 0.0.0", only...