Chapter 6. Live Voting with Phoenix

Previously, we finished all of the remaining work that we needed to get our application polished up and tested across the board. Our application is pretty solid and we're finally at a point where we can start diving into some of the truly amazing features of Phoenix: the out-of-the-box support for web sockets! Before we can dive too deep into how to start implementing these in Phoenix, we should probably take a quick sidebar to discuss what web sockets even are!

Web Sockets are means of passing data back and forth through a dedicated line (or socket) that allows for real-time communication back and forth between a client (your web browser) and the server (your Phoenix application). This information can either be solely limited to communication with a single client or multiple clients simultaneously (a broadcast message, similar to chat rooms). This allows the construction of real-time applications where the server is responsible for acting as the message...