Chapter 1. Ride the Phoenix
This chapter covers
- What Phoenix is and its benefits
- The power of the Elixir programming language
- The differences between object-oriented and functional programming
- Some potential drawbacks to using Phoenix and Elixir
Phoenix is a web framework built on top of the Elixir programming language. Every day, Phoenix and Elixir applications
- Provide real-time communications between thousands and thousands of users on limited hardware
- Process data on highly distributed systems
- Respond gracefully to errors by having supervisors restart workers when they crash
- Provide simple or complex websites to users all over the world
In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to the Elixir programming language and the Phoenix web framework. We’ll take a look at the main advantages and disadvantages a language like Elixir and a framework like Phoenix provide. By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a good overview of these technologies and why they exist, and you’ll be ready to jump into learning the details and creating your own web applications.