Build Your Own Web Framework in Elixir

6

Working with HTML and Embedded Elixir

In the previous chapter, we learned how to leverage plugs to implement controllers and routers for our web framework. We were able to receive an HTTP request from our web server and, using our controllers, respond with HTML content. However, the HTML content was always static. In order to support server-side rendering of HTML in a more dynamic way, we need the ability to define HTML templates that have parts that can be dynamically evaluated right before responding. Rails does this using HTML files embedded with Ruby code, which is dynamically evaluated right before the response. Phoenix, before version 1.6, used a similar strategy using the EEx package.

In this chapter, we will dig into the EEx library ...