The Moving Parts of a Channel
Explore the fundamental components of Phoenix Channels and how they work together to enable real-time, persistent connections in Elixir applications. Learn about Channel modules, socket management, transport protocols like WebSockets, PubSub messaging, and the advanced Presence system for tracking clients across distributed nodes. This lesson prepares you to implement channels and client-side JavaScript for dynamic web communication.
We'll cover the following...
Before we implement our own Channel, let’s take a look at the moving parts that make up a Channel.
The pieces of a Channel
We often talk about Phoenix Channels as if each one is a single, monolithic entity working independently. In fact, there are a number of moving parts acting in harmony across multiple layers that make Channels work as well as they do.
Let’s take a quick look at the most important ones to get a better feeling for the whole.
The Channel module
The Channel module is the tip of the iceberg, which is the most visible part that we will interact with. It’s a custom Behaviour defined within Phoenix. The Behaviour specifies that we ...