Preface

I remember when I created my first true website—it was called The U2 Shack, and, as the name suggests, it was a site dedicated to the band U2. This was back in 1998, and it was handwritten with Windows Notepad in straight HTML. The site was hosted on GeoCities and was part of a link ring. It took forever to update because it was all hardcoded HTML, but it was mine and I was proud of it.

Fast forward about three years, and I was introduced to Perl and then PHP. I was amazed that the server could process variables given to it by the web browser and spit out custom-built HTML based on the user’s request. For example, one fun site I made in those early days was a word-search generator. The user could input a list of words they wanted to be in a puzzle, as well as the width and height and whether to allow some words to be hidden backwards. The server would take all this information, brute-force a custom word-search puzzle, and output it in HTML for the user to print.

I happily developed sites with PHP for years, and then Ruby on Rails dropped. Like many developers of the time, I was amazed at a video of the Rails author creating a fully functional blog engine in 10 minutes. I was sold. Almost instantly, I switched over to learning Ruby and developing websites with Ruby on Rails. I had tolerated Perl and PHP but fell in love with Ruby in 2005. For over a decade, Ruby and Ruby on Rails were my tools of choice, and I still use them every day.

However, in 2014, I heard rumblings of a new language called Elixir, by José Valim. José was a major contributor to Ruby on Rails (and is still listed as number five on the all-time contributor list), but he was feeling some of the shortcomings of the Ruby language (like memory usage and the difficulty of developing for parallel and distributed programs). I bought a book about Elixir that year and fell in love all over again.

Also in 2014, Chris McCord began building the web framework known as Phoenix on top of Elixir. Phoenix version 1.0 was ultimately released in August of 2015, and its major features were real-time communications, productive tooling, and blazingly fast responses. It’s been quite a journey since the days of developing in straight HTML, but ever since I discovered Phoenix, every web project I start begins with mix phx.new.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at multiple Elixir conferences over the years and blogging about Elixir, Phoenix, and Ecto at geoffreylessel.com. I now have the great pleasure of introducing you to Phoenix in this book. I sincerely hope that the topics presented in this book allow you to build amazing applications of your own. If you do, I’d love to hear about it at [email protected].

Happy reading!