Let’s Build our own web framework in Elixir

Web Framework Devlog

  • Use Plug as a base

  • Include time-based API versioning

    • One cool trick I saw was to pattern match on the Plug conn field like so
    def create(%Plug.Conn{req_headers: "11-21-22"} = conn, _params) do
	# Handle new version
end

def create(conn, _params) do
	# Handle old version
end

  • Include request idempotency

  • Include idiomatic input validation

  • Include idiomatic .env file loading

  • Include rejecting all requests are aren’t of the right media type with 415 error

  • Add support for async requests with 201 status

  • Add support for blank responses with 204 status

  • Include idiomatic job accepting

    • Immediately give a 202 response
    • Provide a URL where the job status can be checked
    • This is a stateless way to do it, but this could also be supported in a stateful way via events?

  • Support RESTful JSON views

    • Resource graph based views!

  • Support autogenerated API documentation

  • Support the future of API’s

    • Model-View-Update like Elm. Expose a strongly typed data structure that can be richly queried/subscribed to. And then instead of mutations support Elm style commands as RPC commands or something

  • Support real-time

    • Able to define resource graph events!

  • Don’t know where else to put this but wanted to write it down:

    • Would it make sense to have the web layer be a protocol? Like if the idea is to expose a read-only data structure, it would be cool if a bulk of the API-side logic was standardized, and you would just have to implement some functions for your specific data structure. This may help with stuff like auto-generated documentation?