Writing Elixir code is not really exciting to me, but, to be honest, if someone today wants to create an application from scratch and is looking for a big pool developers and a battle tested distributed infrastructure (the BEAM VM), Elixir is probably one of the best choice nowadays. The community is active, the documentation is great, the language looks like a mix between Ruby and Python, without the annoying object part and with all the good feature from Erlang. This is why, today, we will use Elixir with bandit to create a minimal web server supporting both HTTP and WebSockets.
bandit has been created as an alternative to cowboy, fully coded in Elixir and designed to be integrated and highly compatible with the Phoenix framework. When it came out few years ago, the community did a lot of noise and I never find a moment to test it. bandit supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 natively. WebSockets protocols support can be added with the help of WebSock and WebSockAdapter modules. At this time, it does not support HTTP/3 (yet?).
The idea here is not to follow blindly the Phoenix framework documentation and to create yet another website-like-project, but just to learn how to use bandit API, a bit like I did in a previous publication on cowboy. Let start our journey by creating a new Elixir library called desperados. It will contain all our experiments.
