GenServer Basics

Coming Soon

This lesson will teach you GenServer - the most important OTP behavior for building stateful, concurrent servers. You’ll learn how to:

• Implement the GenServer behavior and its callbacks
• Manage server state across multiple client requests
• Handle synchronous and asynchronous calls
• Implement proper error handling and recovery
• Build the foundation for your chat server components

What You’ll Build

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have implemented:

• A basic GenServer with state management
• Synchronous and asynchronous API functions
• Error handling and recovery patterns
• Performance considerations for GenServers
• A template for chat server components

Key Concepts Preview

-behaviour(gen_server).

% API
start_link() -> gen_server:start_link(?MODULE, [], []).
get_state(Pid) -> gen_server:call(Pid, get_state).
update_state(Pid, NewState) -> gen_server:cast(Pid, {update, NewState}).

% Callbacks
handle_call(get_state, _From, State) -> {reply, State, State};
handle_cast({update, NewState}, _State) -> {noreply, NewState}.

This lesson builds on the OTP principles from Lesson 9 and prepares you for building your first GenServer in Lesson 11.

This lesson is currently under development. Check back soon for the complete content!