Introduction

The Phoenix framework is really a combination of libraries:

• Ranch
• Cowboy
• Plug
• Phoenix
• Ecto

This combination provides many tools to spin up web-server applications fairly easily, drawing on the history of many other frameworks. Still, it works very hard not to drive the design of our application. That ultimately means that a standard Phoenix application can be broken down into two main parts:

• The incoming web interface part (which includes Ranch, Cowboy, Plug, and Phoenix)

• The rest of the application (mostly Elixir and Ecto code).