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

Building a view interface

In order to build a view interface, let’s first start with the example_server_html_eex app that we built in the previous chapter. In this app, we made the controller module responsible for both capturing a request from a router and rendering the final HTML. In this section, we will start by moving the rendering responsibility to Goldcrest.View.

We can start by defining the Goldcrest.View module that can house the render/3 function, which evaluates the EEx template and calls the render function in the Goldcrest.Controller module.

Let’s create a new file in the goldcrest package:

lib/goldcrest/view.ex

defmodule Goldcrest.View do
  require EEx
  alias Goldcrest.Controller
  def render(conn, file, assigns) do
    contents =
      file
      |> html_file_path()
      |> EEx.eval_file(assigns...