HTTP Requests in Elixir vs. JavaScript with Yordis Prieto & Stephen Chudleigh

Elixir Wizards

In today’s episode, Sundi and Owen are joined by Yordis Prieto and Stephen Chudleigh to compare notes on HTTP requests in Elixir vs. Ruby, JavaScript, Go, and Rust. They cover common pain points when working with APIs, best practices, and lessons that can be learned from other programming languages.

Yordis maintains Elixir's popular Tesla HTTP client library and shares insights from building APIs and maintaining open-source projects. Stephen has experience with Rails and JavaScript, and now works primarily in Elixir. They offer perspectives on testing HTTP requests and working with different libraries.

While Elixir has matured, there is room for improvement - especially around richer struct parsing from HTTP responses. The discussion highlights ongoing efforts to improve the developer experience for HTTP clients in Elixir and other ecosystems.

Topics Discussed in this Episode

• HTTP is a protocol - but each language has different implementation methods
• Tesla represents requests as middleware that can be modified before sending
• Testing HTTP requests can be a challenge due to dependence on outside systems
• GraphQL, OpenAPI, and JSON API provide clear request/response formats
• Elixir could improve richer parsing from HTTP into structs
• Focus on contribution ergonomics lowers barriers for new participants
• Maintainers emphasize making contributions easy via templates and clear documentation
• APIs drive adoption of standards for client/server contracts
• They discuss GraphQL, JSON API, OpenAPI schemas, and other standards that provide clear request/response formats
• TypeScript brings types to APIs and helps to validate responses
• Yordis notes that Go and Rust make requests simple via tags for mapping JSON to structs
• Language collaboration shares strengths from different ecosystems and inspires new libraries and tools for improving the programming experience

Links Mentioned

Elixir-Tesla Library: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla
Yordis on Github: https://github.com/yordis
Yordis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alchemist_ubi
Yordis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yordisprieto/
Yordis on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@alchemistubi
Stephen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stepchud
Stephen's projects on consciousness: https://harmonicdevelopment.us
Owen suggests: Http.cat
HTTParty: https://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty
Guardian Library: https://github.com/ueberauth/guardian
Axios: https://axios-http.com/
Straw Hat Fetcher: https://github.com/straw-hat-team/nodejs-monorepo/tree/master/packages/%40straw-hat/fetcher
Elixir Tesla Wiki: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/wiki
HTTPoison: https://github.com/edgurgel/httpoison
Tesla Testing: https://hexdocs.pm/tesla/readme.html#testing
Tesla Mock: https://hexdocs.pm/tesla/Tesla.Mock.html
Finch: https://hex.pm/packages/finch
Mojito: https://github.com/appcues/mojito
Erlang Libraries and Frameworks Working Group: https://github.com/erlef/libs-and-frameworks/ and https://erlef.org/wg/libs-and-frameworks

Special Guests: Stephen Chudleigh and Yordis Prieto.