Chapter 9: Creating a Web Application with Athena
Crystal's similarities with Ruby have made it quite popular as a web-based language hoping to entice some Ruby on Rails, among other frameworks, users to make the switch to Crystal. Crystal boasts quite a few popular frameworks, from simple routers to full stack, and everything in between. In this chapter, we are going to walk through how to create an application using one of these frameworks in the Crystal ecosystem called Athena Framework. While we will be making heavy use of this framework, we will also cover more general topics that can be leveraged irrespective of what framework you ultimately decide upon. By the end of the chapter, we will have covered the following topics:
- Understanding Athena's architecture
- Getting started with Athena
- Implementing database interactions
- Leveraging content negotiation
