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

Taking Goldcrest for a spin

In this section, we will use what we’ve built, and the features we’ve added to Goldcrest up to this point, to build an example web application. This application will support routes that respond with both HTML and JSON. We will also test out the new feature added to Goldcrest.View, which allows us to call a helper function inside an HTML template.

Let’s start by creating a new mix project and adding goldcrest to its mix dependencies:

mix.exs

$ mix new tasks_web --sup
..
$ cd tasks_web
defmodule TasksWeb.MixProject do
  # ..
  # Run "mix help deps" to learn about dependencies.
  defp deps do
    [
      {:goldcrest, path: "../goldcrest"}
    ]
  end
end

Running mix deps.get should resolve hex dependencies for the tasks_web app.

Now, let’s add a router module with a default 404 handler....