Exploring the web one Elixir at a time
I was recently asked to put something together that covered the basics of Elixir but figured that this was already covered pretty well in other places like the Getting Started guide on the Elixir Language website and I didn’t want to just regurgitate the content of those texts.
In the previous posts, we have been using the temporary Erlang Term Storage or ETS to store the data. As this is an in-memory store, any data that is stored is lost whenever the application is stopped.
In this post, we will look to change this and make the data persist between application restarts. To do this we will be using Disc-backed Erlang Term Storage - DETS. This writes the data to a specified file on the disc. For this application using DETS is fine as the data requirements are very small. Should this site take off, then I would recommend using Mnesia.
In the last of these articles on the link shortener, I am going to discuss static assets.
There are two ways of serving static assets - through a webserver like Apache (Apache Webserver) or using Webmachine.
In the last part of this series Using Ewebmachine to create a link shortener (part 1) we covered setting up the basic application and services.
In this part, we will add in some listing functionality, that will output in a number of formats: HTML, XML, JSON.
As an extension to the examples presented in my previous post: Basic templating with Elixir-Mustache, I am going to look at separating the HTML from the code.
This week I’ll be looking at basic, inline templating using Mustache (Elixir-Mustache) within the context of Ewebmachine by way of an aside to the work that we have been doing on the link shortener as presented in my previous posts.
In a slight change to the previous post, I will look in more detail at Ewebmachine. To help with this I am using the excellent tutorial on Webmachine that is in Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks published by Pragmatic Programmers as a basis.
Thanks for showing an interest in this.
This is not an exhaustive discussion on the ins and outs of setting this up and I do not profess to be an expert. I am also not an expert in Elixir, Erlang or Webmachine, so I might not be able to answer any questions or offer support.
