Building Your First GenServer

Coming Soon

This lesson will guide you through building a complete chat room GenServer that manages users, handles messages, and maintains state. You’ll learn how to:

• Design a chat room GenServer with full functionality
• Implement user join/leave operations
• Handle message broadcasting within a room
• Manage room state and user tracking
• Add persistence and recovery capabilities

What You’ll Build

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

• A complete chat room GenServer
• User management with join/leave operations
• Message broadcasting to all room members
• State persistence and recovery
• A working prototype of your chat server core

Key Concepts Preview

-module(chat_room).
-behaviour(gen_server).

% State record
-record(room_state, {name, users = [], messages = []}).

% API
join_room(RoomPid, User) -> gen_server:call(RoomPid, {join, User}).
send_message(RoomPid, User, Message) -> gen_server:call(RoomPid, {message, User, Message}).

This lesson builds on the GenServer basics from Lesson 10 and prepares you for the supervision patterns we’ll explore in Lesson 12.

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