Functional programming with Elixir
Elixir 1.0 [1] offers easy entry into the world of functional programming by relying on the Erlang [2] virtual machine. An Elixir program can invoke any Erlang function with no run-time cost. In this article, I demonstrate Elixir's capabilities by rolling out the distributed server system shown in Figure 1. The system runs a proxy on the first server node and forwards incoming HTTP requests to one of two server nodes on the local network to boost performance. Both nodes store the content redundantly and deliver identical documents on request that are delivered as responses to the clients via the proxy.
Figure 1: The sample application uses the localhost loopback network to simulate three server nodes.
Friendly Parasite
Listing 1 shows the installation of the current version of Elixir (version 1.0.4-1) on Ubuntu 14.04. Line 1 uses wget to pick up a Debian package that points to an external package repository with the current versions of Elixir and Erlang. The dpkg package manager bundles the list in line 2 to the correct location on the filesystem; the next line updates and parses the list. Finally, Elixir and the erlang-dev packages are installed on the computer.
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