Programming Elixir

Tidying Up the Interface

As we left it, our server works but is ugly to use. Our callers have to make explicit GenServer calls, and they have to know the registered name for our server process. We can do better. Let’s wrap this interface in a set of three functions in our server module: start_link, next_number, and increment_number. The first of these calls the GenServer start_link method. As we’ll cover in a couple of chapters when we look at supervisors, the name start_link is a convention. start_link must return the correct status values to OTP; as our code simply delegates to the GenServer module, this is taken care of.

Following the definition of start_link, the next two functions are the external API to issue call and cast requests to ...