Lonestar ElixirConf 2017- Leveling up your Phoenix Projects with OTP by  Nico Mihalich
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2017-02-28

Lonestar ElixirConf 2017- Leveling up your Phoenix Projects with OTP by  Nico Mihalich

With Elixir and Phoenix, the toolkit for building web applications has expanded dramatically. Beyond Phoenix's routers and controllers awaits a whole new world of features and ways to build reliable systems. With this talk, you'll see how. 

When learning or adopting a new language, you naturally draw on your existing domain knowledge as a stepping stone. Building a web app in one language is much like building one in another. You handle requests, responses, and for most languages, give little thought to stateful processes and long-running subsystems. However, with Elixir and Phoenix everything is different. We can compose applications using isolated, stateful subsystems that a regular stateless request can interact with and leverage. 

Over the course of the talk we will take a practical approach to building a small application in Elixir, walking through all the steps and describing what language features we are taking advantage of and why. Along the way we'll explore GenServer, OTP, backpressure management, synchronous vs asynchronous calls, a testing strategy, and integration into a Phoenix application. 

The end result is a fully functional Elixir project, integrated into a Phoenix application.