Volunteers wanted for new project

[Joe Armstrong]

Volunteers wanted --

So here's a little project that I'd like to do (hobby hack #3367 :-)

Here's the problem:

    The other day I wanted to see if anybody had written a parser for
    C in Erlang.  I did not know of such a parser, so I Googled a bit
    and turned up nothing.  I posted to the Erlang list - after a few
    days I got a tip that lead me some code that almost did what I
    wanted - a much better starting point than hacking the thing from
    scratch.

         This is crazy - almost exactly what I want had already been
         written 4 years ago - but a Google search did not reveal it,
         nor was it in any catalogs. I didn't know about this (I knew
         about jungerl) (of course). Now I'm hardly an Erlang newby so
         if I can't find it (or even know about it) how can a real
         Erlang newby find anything?

What I want is a "report a resource" thing on the web.

All you should have to do is go to a web site fill in a form with the
following:

           resource type: erlang
           reported by: <name>
           url: <url>
           keywords: <k1,k2,k3>
           description: <....>
           <click>

Or send email to some web site.

    I guess you'd need some sort of authentication so that spammers
    could not hijack your <name> Some kind of voting or reputation
    system could be used to rank resources depending upon who voted
    for them ...

We also need a search engine to answer resource queries.

    My guess is that a reputation based system would be pretty good. I
    don't want to name names but we all know that if <XYZ> recommended
    something it must be pretty good.

So if this doesn't exist I think we should build it as a group effort.
Even if it does exist we should build it, I'll tell you why later.

Volunteers are needed for the various bits:

     - an architect                             (decides on the
interfaces, the components)
     - an integrator                            (takes delivery of the
components)
     - a hoster                                 (somebody needs to
host the thing)
     - a front end                              (handles HTTP and
email requests)
     - a database/query backend                 (handles queries)
     - admin / authorization / anti-spam stuff  (handles security)
     - an artist /css guru                      (makes the site beautiful)
     - a few programmers

    This project sounds simple - actually it *is* simple - I can hear
    you thinking "I could do this is 5 minutes with lamp/RoR/mySQL/PHP
    ..."  but it gives an excellent opportunity to try and make an
    infinitely scalable-flexable thing and try integrating our
    favorite tools.

We could do a simple yaws/menisia/vanilla HTML solution or
a Riak/couchDB/rabbit/nitrogen/xmpp thingy

    RATHER THAN MAKING A FANCY-WEB SITE USING SIMPLE TECHNOLOGIES WE
    MAKE A VERY VERY SIMPLE WEB-SITE WITH FANCY TECHNOLOGIES.

    THE KICKER IS THAT WE TRY TO MAKE IT INFINITELY SCALABLE,
    INFINITELY FAULT-TOLERANT, AMAZINGLY EASY TO SCALE AND DEPLOY.

This is why this should be a collaborative effort - rather than
a one man hack - this is to *force* collaboration between
the couch and the rabbits of the Erlang world.


/Joe