About this Book

This book is about building web applications with the primary web framework for the Elixir language, Phoenix. In its pages we will walk you through building a web application, piece by piece.

In Part I, we will show you how to build a traditional model-view-controller (MVC) application. We’ll guide you through the Phoenix landscape, showing you in intimate detail how things are stitched together. We will show you how to build a controller and how to organize your business logic into modules called contexts. Along the way, we’ll build our own authentication and build database-backed code with a database library called Ecto.

In Part II, we will explore channels and presence, Phoenix features that allow a highly interactive experience. Then we’ll learn to tie those interactive features into Elixir’s extensive OTP, a framework for building concurrent, self-healing projects. We will focus on techniques for productively writing code that will be easier to maintain in the future.

To illustrate both parts of this book fully, we will build a web application together. The application will let users take videos and annotate them with real-time events.