Background

Get introduced to Elixir and Phoenix and find out who this course is intended for.

The history of web development

In the early days of web development, well before web frameworks existed, a Perl script in an Apache cgi-bin directory and a couple of static HTML files were all we needed.

In the intervening years, web frameworks for both the front and back-ends have become ubiquitous. This has been fantastic for the industry. The productivity gains are undeniable. The consistency across applications allows us to onboard new developers more quickly.

Web development

Despite the gains, there are also disadvantages. The way we’re commonly taught to use frameworks causes extremely tight coupling between the framework components and our business logic. Databases have gone from simply augmenting storage to dominating the way we model application domains.

The importance of Elixir and Phoenix

Most people use Elixir and Phoenix for the performance, and there’s no question that the performance is fantastic.

Elixir and Phoenix provide solid solutions to these long-standing problems without sacrificing gains. Elixir is especially useful because of the access it gives us to OTPOpen Telecom Platform.

Elixir and Phoenix also open up new possibilities, bringing back some of the benefits of statefulness that we’ve lost with the rise of HTTP.

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Throughout this course, we’ll build a web application together that shows what Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix can really do when used well together. Most of all, however, we’ll have fun. We’ll learn things you can use to make the code for our day job or side projects more beautiful, easier to maintain, and a joy to work on.

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