[erlang-questions] Is erlang a web language?

[Nick Gerakines]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 12:23 AM, Dmitrii Dimandt <dmitriid@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On Feb 13, 2009, at 12:40 AM, Nick Gerakines wrote:
>
> I'd like to step in and say that Erlang is an awesome platform for
> writing web services. In fact, to back that statement up, I'll let you
> metaphorically peak into how we are using it for just that.
>
> Here at EA we are building a pretty large web service powered by
> Erlang to support different parts of the EA Online group. We've been
> using tools like MochiWeb, etap (github.com/ngerakines/etap), protocol
> buffers (github.com/ngerakines/erlang_protobuffs), dynomite
> (github.com/cliffmoon/dynomite) (CAVEAT: it's unofficial/unimplemented
> but we've got use cases that jive), log_roller
> (github.com/JacobVorreuter/log_roller), ejabberd and list goes on.
>
> That's exactly what fess was talking about. Had you not mentioned these
> projects, no one would ever discover them (well, I would, but I run a
> Russian Erlang-related-news site, so I scour the web, blogs and mailing
> lists for news and bits and pieces of info)
> Erlang should really get a repositroy that is as ubiquitous and as easy to
> use as Ruby's gem or Perl's CPAN. Yes, there is a lot of utter crap in those
> repositories, but they are valuable for the fact that you can easily search
> and instal necessary modules.
> For instance, I can name at least three mutually incompatible JSON
> encoding/decoding libraries written for erlang (there are at least 5, I
> think). Definitely at least two libraries dealing with utf-8. Two OpenID
> projects. Two dedicated wrappers for traditional RDBMs (and a third, which
> is a more general ORM-style library). At least three (I think) projects that
> connect to Amazon's web services in one way or another. Two projects
> interfacing with memcached. And the list *will* grow. These are just
> projects I can name off the top of my head
> "Let a hundred flowers blossom" (c) Mao Zedong
> Quite often I don't think that authors of some of these project even now
> that similar projects exist. Forget the users, they will *never* even
> discover some of them :)

I agree with what you are getting at. I would love it if there was
some sort of standard packaging and installation system for Erlang. A
gem equivalent or Module::Build, if you will. But there really isn't.
At EA we've been using your standard `make`, `make test` and `make
install` targets which works for what we want and is rpm/ebuild/deb
friendly.

I've been watching GitHub really grow with Erlang projects lately.
That is where we put all of ours as well.

# Nick Gerakines