Missed Opportunity: Phoenix needs a guide for creating REST APIs

[doomspork]

@Cruz

It should also mention that if you’re not using a database and you don’t need bi-directional communication, you might consider not even using Phoenix at all as Elixir, Plug, Cowboy and Jason should be sufficient.

We’re working on a blog series over at elixirschool.com on this very thing! The first post does focus on HTML just to illustrate how simple that can be without Phoenix but there is a small section on using JSON: Building web apps with Plug.Router | Blog · Elixir School. Next post will cover deploying our sample application to Heroku followed by a post series focused on building JSON only API using Plug.Router. I’m sure we can find a way to work in a post on using Phoenix for the same task.

@Cruz

Then, it could mention that other stuff you need is the same as regular Elixir development, e.g. Supervisors, GenServers, ETS, CacheX, CVS and/or XML parsing, etc.

I’m not sure this fits in a guide to developing JSON APIs though. We have most of this content on elixirschool.com already. Maybe we would benefit from a section focused on apply of these concepts?

We started on a repo of partial projects that you can finish yourself to explore Elixir but it could certainly be improved: GitHub - elixirschool/homework: A collection of coding exercises to be completed in conjunction with the lessons available on elixirschool.com