Preface
The preceding quote from Stroustrup shows just how fast technology is evolving. We’re building more complex software day by day while also building it at an ever-increasing rate. However, as the complexity of software increases, so do abstractions around its fundamentals. As a result, it is easier to build software using those abstractions but harder to completely understand how a piece of software works the way it does. This is true for programming languages, deployment tools, and several other types of tools we use. Another one of those tools is a web framework.
A web framework is a tool or a set of tools that assists in building and releasing a web application. This is accomplished through the process of standardization and building abstractions around those standardized models. Web frameworks usually include tools for server management, data management, templating, and so on. From the 1990s to 2021, we have seen the evolution of web frameworks from Java Servlets and ASP.NET to Rails and Elixir’s Phoenix. Over the course of this period, we have significantly decreased the average amount of effort required to build a web application. However, since Phoenix facilitates productive web development, I frequently come across developers being bewildered by its “magic.” That “magic” is often one obstacle that stands in the way of an Elixir web developer to cross the seemingly never-ending bridge of mid-level to senior-level. It is also one of the key factors that determines how confident they feel as a developer.
This book aims to help developers overcome that obstacle by building a web framework from scratch using Elixir. The goal is to demystify the aforementioned Phoenix magic by breaking it down into components and designing/building them from the ground up while testing their expected behaviors. I expect developers to feel more confident in their web development skills and Elixir knowledge after reading this book. Maybe, some will even go on to make contributions to the Elixir open source community.