Maartz

Maartz

Build It With Nitrogen Book Club

The very first time I’ve seen a line of Elixir I was in awe. Coming from Ruby the syntax was familiar.
But I wanted to know what was this “Erlang” beast, scaring so many people.
Erlang’s syntax was in fact not so “atrocious” and even quite nice.
And after watching this talk from Todd Resudek, I was convinced that to better appreciate the BEAM ecosystem, you need to grasp Erlang.

And so I’ve bought this book, it’s pretty thick but, I’m very eager to read how they dealt with all HTML, forms, string, etc. that the web represents.

I’ll use this book club to tell you how’s the journey and what are my thoughts about it.

Most Liked

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

The Nitrogen library is so fun. ^.^

Maartz

Maartz

Chapter 1 - Frying Pan to Fire

I really like the way the book is written. It’s like a story. It’s very different from all the other books of the same category.

Installing Nitrogen is not like installing rails nor phoenix, you need to clone the nitrogen repo under nitrogen/nitrogen.

After that, by cd into the nitrogen folder, it will generate a fresh new app with make.

make rel_inets PROJECT=devtalk

By inspecting the Makefile I can see that you’re not forced to use one specific web server like Erlang’s basic one.
You can choose between – all with different versions like slim:

  • Cowboy
  • Inets
  • Mochiweb
  • Webmachine
  • Yaws

To be honest I only knew the existence of Cowboy and Inets. Probably gonna check the others.

By cd into devtalk and running bin/nitrogen console the server starts running on 8080.

The code which interests me is under the site folder.

By crack opening the templates/bare.html as suggested by the book, I can see this:

It seems to be the Nitrogen’s “secret sauce”. Like sharding for MongoDB web-scale…

I really like the little notes like this one:

Most of the Erlang community prefers Emacs,
but the authors are oddballs and prefer Vim.

I agree a 100 percent :laughing:

It’s important to note that since Nitrogen 3, it uses Rebar3.
Also that ViM and Emacs got an extension to handle a special indentation for Nitrogen.

It goes from this:

Elements = #panel { body=[
                         #span { text="Hello, World"}
                         ]},

to this:

Elements = #panel {body=[
    #span{text="Hello, World!"}
]},

Which is in fact probably quite helpful in a big file.
The syntax reminds me of Elm, and its special way to define HTML in this style.

This first chapter is a little ice breaker, nothing too technical, but it lays the foundation of the book. I kinda like it.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Ooo exciting stuff @Maartz!! I’m looking forward to following your journey with this book and Nitrogen!

I’ll be interested in hearing your thoughts how things differ from Elixir/Phoenix-land as well if you post any :nerd_face:

Where Next?

Popular Community topics Top

finner
As one of my New Year resolutions is to read more tech I’ve decided on an attempt to document my travels in Mannings Modern Java in Actio...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
RobertKielty
My overall initial first impressions of this book are very good. I will document my local spacemacs setup to as I work through the book.
New
rustkas
To be a more productive reader when rereading a book, it is very convenient to create small rebar3 projects based on books’ samples and i...
New
mafinar
TL;DR I am reading “Domain Modeling Made Functional” and discussing and keeping a journal of what I learned from it, any co-readers welco...
New
AstonJ
With Tailwind now the default CSS framework shipped with Phoenix we thought it would be nice to run this book club on the Elixir Forum. ...
New
AstonJ
With Phoenix and LiveView having recently had a fairly major release, and Programming Phoenix LiveView being updated too, we thought it w...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
When the pandemic, heart disease, and personal tragedy threatened to steal everything the Tates spent years building, they found hope, he...
New
TomMahon
How did a sleepy valley become the epicenter of the technological world as we know it? In the 40th Anniversary Edition of my book, “Charg...
New
alvinkatojr
https://fs.blog/mental-models/ I’ve been reading Farnham Street for a while, and this topic is the recommended starting point for new re...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
dasdom
No chair. I have a standing desk. This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 28379 760
New
First poster: joeb
The File System Access API with Origin Private File System. WebKit supports new API that makes it possible for web apps to create, open,...
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File > New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New