[erlang-questions] http client and server: inets, ibrowse, yaws

[Serge Aleynikov]

Ingela Anderton Andin wrote:
>> Also I need to embed an simple HTTP server and got the same problem with
>> using 'yaws' or inets 'httpd'. Furthermore I cannot figure out how to start
>> httpd without config file or root directory ... yaws is simplest to embed.
> 
> 
> This one is harder to answer. The intes httpd and yaws have different approaches  
> and both have their pros and cons. The Inets one is very old and inspired by apache. It also has a lot of legacy, that I would rather get rid of but that is impossible as we have customers that use it a lot. I  think that yaws is also used a lot in the open source community and I can see things I like about it. 
> 
> There is no officially supported way to start inets
> without a config file, although webtool does that. I would not really recommend using webtools
> strategy as it might change without warning. It's in the plans for inets to improve start
> strategies but I am not making any promises until when this will be ready. 

Being able to start inets by providing configuration options to the 
start function or from the application's environment in addition to the 
config file would definitely be a big plus.

We've had quite a positive experience in using inets HTTP server.  Not 
tried it for large sites, but we've successfully used it for internal 
AJAX client applications, extended it with custom modules, etc.

Serge