Elixir in Action

Chapter 6. Generic server processes

This chapter covers

• Building a generic server process
• Using gen_server

In chapter 5, you became familiar with basic concurrency techniques: you learned how to create processes and communicate with them. I also explained the idea behind stateful server processes—long-running processes that maintain a state and can react to messages, do some processing, optionally send a response, and maybe change the internal process state.

Server processes play an important role and are used frequently when building highly concurrent systems in Elixir and Erlang, so we’ll spend some time exploring them in detail. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to reduce some of the boilerplate associated with server processes, such ...