Gain insights into building scalable backend applications with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix. Learn about persistent connections via Phoenix Channels, and explore distinct, decoupled application layers.

Functional Web Development with  Elixir, OTP and Phoenix by The Pragmatic Programmer_ .png

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Elixir and OTP provide exceptional tools to build rock-solid backend applications that scale. In this course, you’ll build a web application in a radically different way, with a backend that holds application state. You’ll use persistent Phoenix Channel connections instead of HTTP’s request-response, and create the full application in distinct, decoupled layers.

In Part 1, you’ll start by building the business logic as a separate application, without Phoenix. You’ll model the application domain with Elixir functions and simple data structures.

In Part 2, you’ll add in the GenServer Behaviour to make managing in-memory state a breeze. 

In Part 3, you’ll build a web interface with Phoenix where you’ll use Phoenix Channels to establish persistent connections between the stateful server and a stateful front-end client.

Needless to say, you’re going to love this way of building web apps!

Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP and Phoenix

## Logic and interface

We’ve done a lot in a short amount of time. We created a new project for our web interface. We brought the game logic in as a dependency and got the interface to call into the game server.

That’s the surface-level view. Looking at it more deeply, we solved one of the most vexing problems related to using web frameworks. We created a clean separation between logic and interface that makes the testing and the maintenance of our application a breeze. If we ever need to upgrade to a newer major version of Phoenix, it’ll be a significantly easier task than it would be with other frameworks.

At this point, we’re ready to tackle one of the most exciting parts of Phoenix—Channels. Channels provide persistent, stateful connections between back-ends and front-ends, and they scale beautifully. That’s where we’re headed next.

# Logic and interface

We’ve done a lot in a short amount of time. We created a new project for our web interface. We brought the game logic in as a dependency and got the interface to call into the game server.

That’s the surface-level view. Looking at it more deeply, we solved one of the most vexing problems related to using web frameworks. We created a clean separation between logic and interface that makes the testing and the maintenance of our application a breeze. If we ever need to upgrade to a newer major version of Phoenix, it’ll be a significantly easier task than it would be with other frameworks.

At this point, we’re ready to tackle one of the most exciting parts of Phoenix—Channels. Channels provide persistent, stateful connections between back-ends and front-ends, and they scale beautifully. That’s where we’re headed next.

Let's have a look at what we have learned so far.

Introduction

Mapping Our Route

Model Data and Behavior

Working of State Machines

Add OTP for Concurrency and Fault Tolerance

Process Supervision for Recovery

Generate a New Web Interface with Phoenix

Create Persistent Connections with Phoenix Channels

Appendix

Wrapping Up

Logic and interface