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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
5 (1)
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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

5 (1)
By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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10
Index

Gen(eric) behaviours


OTP defines several generic behaviours we can use when creating Elixir applications. There is the GenServer behaviour, the GenEvent behaviour, and the :gen_fsm behaviour. All of these behaviours have their foundation in an even more general behaviour of OTP processes.

These behaviours remove some of the tedious work we had to do for handling messages and performing work that we encountered in the previous chapter.

We will start with our discussion on GenServer, and then move onto more specialized variants.

Gen(eric) servers

OTP gives us the basic blueprint for a process that receives messages, processes messages and sends a result back, like any server would.

Gen in GenServer really stands for generic or general because it provides the general details of such a process without constraining its users too much into an inflexible solution. For example, we saw that the main event loop of the processes we wrote in the previous chapter were all very similar in nature; the only...

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