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How do I start reinventing the wheel by writing a simple web server, but not too low-level and still stay safe?
Hi people,
I hope you are doing well. I am new to Elixir, and I was intrigued by it when I watched a conference on how Elixir operated, and is able to serve high amount of requests, practically all at the same time and isolating them.
I want to tinker with Elixir, and I have two projects to tackle. One is simple, the other one is… probably not.
One of them is to develop an API consumer and send emails if certain conditions are met. No UIs. Pure logic.
The other one is a server for a small game I will make.
All of them are hobby projects. My main goal is to use and explore Elixir, and deepen my knowledge in networking. I like to reinvent the wheel until I feel some level of competency to start using abstractions/frameworks and stuff. I need suggestion on whether I should use a particular framework or not, and if I should, which one. But before going into that, I will share a quick background info about me:
- I am a web developer working professionally for 1.5 years with C# ASP.NET WebForms, and .NET Core.
- I know how to write Java, and Java Spring Boot.
- Used Ruby, Rails, and Python before. (Though I have not used them for a while now.)
There are frameworks like Phoenix, and Ash. Since this is a hobby project, and my main goal is to deepen my skills and knowledge, maybe they are not a good fit. I have seen people suggesting to use Plugs, or Cowboy. Cowboy seemed interesting, but cannot tell if it is the right direction.
I desire to make things from scratch, but I feel like going too low-level would deter me. It is a matter of personal taste, I know, but I would like to get your suggestions.
Thank you for any insight you could share!
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LostKobrakai
There’s a great video series by Andrea Leopardi if you want to get into lower level networking (tcp/udp):
He also has a book on the topic.
derek-zhou
Welcome. I like to re-inventing wheels too; however, I prefer to understand how the existing wheel works first. For example, I still use Phoenix, but I have replaced many functionalities of Phoenix with my code to scratch my itches.
IloSophiep
Slightly different but if you don’t really care about the “end result” but just want to experiment with some building blocks:
It might be fun to just build a simple TCP server and play around with that and “actors” and (binary) pattern matching. That’s basically a web server, isn’t it? Can go as simple or as hard with your network protocol as you like.
Should give you a sense of how programming and building something like that works out in Elixir.
Something similar is actually one of the introduction chapters of Elixir and specifically Mix / OTP: Task and gen_tcp — Elixir v1.20.2
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