Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix

What we’ll do in this chapter

• implement a GenServer for the game logic
• define a public interface for the game server process
• practice common patterns in OTP Behaviours
• initialize GenServers with the correct state
• use process registration to name individual games

Chapter 4Wrap It Up in a GenServer

We’re about to make a big leap. Up to this point, we’ve focused on modules, functions, and data. This is the synchronous side of Elixir, the world within a process where code executes sequentially. In this chapter, we’ll be moving into the asynchronous side, the world of processes and message passing that provides Elixir’s world-class concurrency and parallelism.

We’re going to build a GenServer that contains all the data and game logic for Islands. We’ll ...