Programming Phoenix

Going Deeper: The Request Pipeline

When we created the hello project, Mix created a bunch of directories and files. It’s time to take a more detailed look at what all of those files do and, by extension, how Phoenix helps you organize applications.

When you think about it, typical web applications are just big functions. Each web request is a function call taking a single formatted string—the URL—as an argument. That function returns a response that’s nothing more than a formatted string. If you look at your application in this way, your goal is to understand how functions are composed to make the one big function call that handles each request. In some web frameworks, that task is easier said than done. Most frameworks have hidden functions ...