Start building your first Phoenix app

Phoenix is a web framework that sits on top of the Elixir programming language, much in the same way that Rails sits atop Ruby or Express sits atop Node and JavaScript. 

Phoenix is very much designed to be a standard Elixir application and thus abides by the same rules and the same principles, but also encompasses all of the same things that make Elixir so great to work with! The first and biggest thing that Phoenix gets via Elixir is first-class and dead-simple concurrency support. Writing code that performs and scales well on multiple core machines is a breeze.

Phoenix also benefits very heavily from being based on a functional immutable language. Large codebases remain very simple to reason with, and the fear of introducing significant breaking changes because of a mutation deeply-nested in your code becomes a thing of the past.

In Chapter 2 of Phoenix Web Development, Brandon Richey guides you through building the skeleton of your first Phoenix app. You'll learn the building blocks of any Phoenix application: controllers, views, and templates (and how they interact). You'll also begin diving into writing your first tests covering controllers and views to start enforcing a strong and real-world systems development life cycle, and by the end of the chapter will have the foundations for the app that will be built thoughout the book: a real-time voting/polling application.

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Until next time,
James at SitePoint