Preface
With Elixir and Phoenix, you build your application the right way the first way: ready to scale and ready for the increasing demands of real-time web applications.
This book will cover the bare basics of the Phoenix web framework through building a community voting application and, in the course, discuss the new structure changes introduced in Phoenix v1.3. We'll cover the initial challenges of getting started with our app, working with the generators to learn more about the structure of a standard Phoenix app. From there, we'll build our application and work with Channels, Schemas, Contexts, and even dive into more advanced topics such as working with Tasks/Async and GenServers. By the end of this book, we'll have a strong grasp of all the core fundamentals of the Phoenix framework, and we'll have built a full production-ready web application from nothing!
Who this book is for
This is for people who have started messing around with Elixir and have enjoyed what they've seen! We'll take those skills and apply them to building a full web application. If you have some knowledge of Elixir and have experience with other web frameworks in other languages and want to see what it's like to build a web application where concurrency and performance are first-class citizens, you're in the right place!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, A Brief Introduction to Elixir and Phoenix, goes over the basics of developing in Elixir and Phoenix and makes the readers understand some of the basic constructs available.
Chapter 2, Building Controllers, Views, and Templates, covers working with the fundamentals of every Phoenix application.
Chapter 3, Storing and Retrieving Vote Data with Ecto Pages, discusses working with data in our database.
Chapter 4, Introducing User Accounts and Sessions, begins to introduce the concept of Users into our system and introduces working with login, logout, and session management.
Chapter 5, Validations, Errors, and Tying Loose Ends, explores working on tightening up our application through validation, error-handling, and general tweaks.
Chapter 6, Live Voting with Phoenix, starts building out a real-time application with Phoenix and JavaScript.
Chapter 7, Improving Our Application and Adding Features, continues to build upon the solid foundation of our application and brings it closer to production-ready.
Chapter 8, Adding Chat to Your Phoenix Application, adds even more real-time feature support.
Chapter 9, Using Presence and ETS in Phoenix, teaches readers to use Phoenix's new Presence support to keep track of what users are logged in or logged out of our system.
Chapter 10, Working with Elixir's Concurrency Model, takes readers through how Elixir handles concurrency implementations at a deeper level.
Chapter 11, Implementing OAuth in Our Application, implements a new way for users to sign in with providers such as Twitter and Google.
Chapter 12, Building an API and Deploying, outlines finishing reading our application, adding an API to interact with our application, and finally finishing deploying our application to production.
To get the most out of this book
- Readers should already have at least a basic understanding of the Elixir programming language and some beginner-level knowledge of common web development terms and techniques
- You will also need an internet-capable programming environment where you can install required software such as Elixir, Phoenix, Node.js, and Postgres
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Conventions used
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CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Let's use String.Chars as an example, where we'll call the h helper on String.Chars to learn more about the module from its documentation."
A block of code is set as follows:
person = %{ name: "Brandon" }
person = %{ name: "Richey" }Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
iex(1)> greeting = "Hello There" "Hello There"
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