ICTPL 2024

Since 2021, Elixir has been the functional language taught as part of the Declarative Programming course at BME. Since the first such semester, there has been a continuous demand from students to try out the language using a sandbox without the need of installing any development environment on their laptops. Some web-based public sandbox solutions already existed for Prolog and Erlang, but not for Elixir. The idea came to reality during the summer of 2023 in the form of the Edux application (an Elixir sandbox for educational purposes). Edux comes with a simple and easy-to-use web interface built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript where you can type in your Elixir module in a textbox, and immediately compile and execute it in an interactive Elixir shell. Edux also provides an option to run your custom function calls without compiling any source code.

Besides the core system, a lot of open-source libraries have been released for Elixir by the community of Elixir enthusiasts. Edux serves as an example for an open-source application written in Elixir to run Elixir. By making the source code publicly available, students can get an insight into the simplicity of writing concurrent web applications based on their studies of sequential functional programming in Elixir.