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

What is a view?

A view is the component of a web framework that is responsible for presenting data to an end user in a digestible way. Typically, in HTML-based web applications, a view is also responsible for handling the end user’s interaction with the application.

In an MVC framework, a view is generally called from a controller implicitly, as with object-oriented web frameworks such as Rails and Django, or explicitly, as with functional web frameworks such as Phoenix. In Chapter 4, we explained how a request-response cycle works in a typical MVC flow. We can see how a view is called toward the end of the request phase and how it is responsible for presenting data in the response phase.

Figure 7.1: The MVC flow

In many web frameworks, views also have accompanying helper components such as templates, partials, or view components. Next, let’s look at how views behave in Phoenix.