Elixir in Action, Third Edition

6 Generic server processes

This chapter covers

• Building a generic server process
• Using GenServer

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 react to messages and maintain 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 as infinite recursion, state management, and message passing.

Erlang provides a helper module for implementing server ...