Creating a Phoenix application

The following recipes of this chapter will relate to an Elixir web framework: Phoenix.

Phoenix is an implementation of the server-side MVC pattern. It is very similar to Ruby on Rails or Python Django, but it is much more than a mere clone.

Phoenix's goal is to combine the high productivity of the mentioned frameworks with high performance, and introduces several concepts such as channels for websocket management, topics as a pub-sub layer, and precompiled templates as well.

Chris McCord created Phoenix, and the first commit dates from May 1, 2014. The implementation pace is impressive and it currently has almost all of the features defined in the initial roadmap; only iOS and Android clients are pending. This project now has more than 80 committers and among them is José Valim, the creator of Elixir.

Our first recipe on Phoenix will show you how to create an application. We will generate the canonical to-do application.

Getting ready

To get started with Phoenix...