Network Programming in Elixir and Erlang

Building Our First Client

Let’s lay the foundations for our client. We’ll start with just using a TCP socket directly, and then we’ll gradually build on top of that. We’ll add a process around the TCP socket whose job is to manage that socket and keep it alive. Then, we’ll add functionality to check in and check out the socket, as well as to queue requests. Finally, we’ll add some failure handling. The following figure is a simplified view of what our client will look like:

From now on, we’ll refer to this type of Elixir/Erlang TCP client as checkout clients.

To follow along with the examples in this section, you should have a Redis server ...