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Elixir

Elixir Trickery: Using Macros and Metaprogramming Without Superpowers

There's hardly any more misunderstood element of Elixir than its metaprogramming power. The way to understand it is actually not to try too hard to wrap your head around it.

Elixir is a language heavily relying on its macro mechanism, which is both powerful and limited, and both complicated and simple, at the same time. The good news is that when you get to know the simple part about it, it's very easy to start writing macros even if you're a complete noob - and I'm going to give you plenty of examples to demonstrate that.

Elixir

Modern Talking with Elixir: Messenger App Tutorial with Phoenix LiveView

Have you ever wondered why Elixir and its ecosystem is gradually becoming the go-to platform for many web application developers who want both performance and productivity, not a tradeoff between them?

Well, we'll show you why - and we'll do it via a thorough crash course of Phoenix Framework's hot deal, Phoenix LiveView, using which we'll build a Messenger-like live chat application.

As of November 2020, the latest Phoenix LiveView version is 0.14.8 - and the series has been updated to match it!

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Elixir

How database transactions work in Ecto and why Elixir makes it awesome?

Today we're going to look at how Ecto, Elixir's first-choice database access library, handles relational (SQL) database transactions - all followed with examples in our GitHub repository.

Elixir

Elixir Trickery: Cheating on Structs, And Why It Pays Off

While we can't say cheating on anyone is okay, we're not as absolutistic when it comes to cheating on Elixir at times.

Structs are there for a reason (we'll start from a brief overview), and that's certainly not for us to cheat on them. But we can if we have to - and we'll sometimes even justify that and get away with it!

Today's article will come in handy especially for those who are interested in developing libraries for Elixir and making them usable across different dependency versions, which is always a problem when writing code intended to be pluggable into different applications.