Web Development with Julia and Genie: A hands-on guide to high-performance server-side web development with the Julia programming language

Get a practical overview of web development in Julia and learn how to build MVC applications with a REST API, and an interactive data dashboard using the Genie web framework

Key Features

• A tutorial on web development from Julia expert, Ivo Balbaert and the creator of the Genie framework, Adrian Salceanu
• A step-by-step approach to building a complete web app with the Genie framework
• Develop secure and fast web apps using server-side development on Julia

Book Description

Julia's high-performance and scalability characteristics and its extensive number of packages for visualizing data make it an excellent fit for developing web apps, web services, and web dashboards. The two parts of this book provide complete coverage to build your skills in web development.

First, you'll refresh your knowledge of the main concepts in Julia that will further be used in web development. Then, you'll use Julia's standard web packages and examine how the building blocks of the web such as TCP-IP, web sockets, HTTP protocol, and so on are implemented in Julia's standard library. Each topic is discussed and developed into code that you can apply in new projects, from static websites to dashboards. You'll also understand how to choose the right Julia framework for a project. The second part of the book talks about the Genie framework. You'll learn how to build a traditional to do app following the MVC design pattern. Next, you'll add a REST API to this project, including testing and documentation. Later, you'll explore the various ways of deploying an app in production, including authentication functionality. Finally, you'll work on an interactive data dashboard, making various chart types and filters.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to build interactive web solutions on a large scale with a Julia-based web framework.

What you will learn

• Understand how to make a web server with HTTP.jl and work with JSON data over the web
• Discover how to build a static website with the Franklin framework
• Explore Julia web development frameworks and work with them
• Uncover the Julia infrastructure for development, testing, package management, and deployment
• Develop an MVC web app with the Genie framework
• Understand how to add a REST API to a web app
• Create an interactive data dashboard with charts and filters
• Test, document, and deploy maintainable web applications using Julia

Who this book is for

This book is for beginner to intermediate-level Julia programmers who want to enhance their skills in designing and developing large-scale web applications. The book helps you adopt Genie without any prior experience with the framework. Julia programming experience and a beginner-level understanding of web development concepts are required.

Table of Contents

1. Julia Programming Overview
2. Using Julia Standard Web Packages
3. Applying Julia in Various Use Cases on the Web
4. Building an MVC ToDo App
5. Adding a REST API
6. Deploying Genie Apps in Production
7. Adding Authentication to Our App
8. Developing Interactive Data Dashboards with Genie

Ivo Balbaert is a lecturer in web programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen, a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in applied physics from the University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies, and for 10 years as project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From 2000 onwards, he switched to partly teaching and partly developing software (at KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerpen). He also wrote an introductory book in Dutch about developing in Ruby and Rails, Programmeren met Ruby en Rails, published by Van Duuren Media. In 2012, he authored a book on the Go programming language, The Way to Go, published by iUniverse. He has written a number of introductory books for new programming languages, notably Dart, Julia, Rust, and Red, all published by Packt.

Adrian Salceanu is the creator and lead maintainer of Genie Framework. He has over two decades of professional work experience as a web developer and software architect, leading agile teams in developing, scaling, and maintaining business critical, data-intensive web applications. Currently, he is the technical founder and CEO of Genie Cloud, a no-code app development platform built with Genie. Adrian is the author of Julia Programming Projects (published by Packt in 2018) and an enthusiastic JuliaLang open-source contributor. He has two master’s degrees, one in Computing, and another in Advanced Computer Science.