[erlang-questions] web framework, db, architecture query, with requirements

[Icarus Alive]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Alain O'Dea <alain.odea@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Icarus Alive <icarus.alive@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Posted a question on Stackoverflow here: http://bit.ly/f3TIuo
>> but this isn't exactly a cross-post, rather an Erlang specific
>> extention of same :-) ... (to avoid any Erlang/Python religious wars,
>> although Stackoverflow is pretty good in preventing such wars, from
>> what I've seen).

<snip>

> Zotonic, the Erlang CMS at http://zotonic.com/ is a proven solution
> for building fast AJAX/comet-driven websites.

Thanks for the pointer to Zotonic. The feature set is quite
impressive, however my understanding is that CMS is good where content
needs to be seen by lots and lots of people, and you have lots of
content to organize, make it searchable, classifiable etc. Just to
clarify my requirement a bit further, this is for a rather niche
service, where small groups of people have access to a fairly limited
set of content, and that content changes quite frequently, i.e.
content older than few days gets purged. And there are possibly
hundreds of thousands of such small groups. Would you say a CMS is
good for such application ?


>  A big plus for me is
> that the resulting sites are easy for non-technical people to maintain
> once you hand it off.

That is indeed a good thing to have, though for my purpose I am still
not quite sure how it will be used.

> It's lightning fast, easy to build on and easy to deeply extend.  It's
> AJAX support is entirely JQuery-driven which fits your bill and makes
> it generally easier to work with and extend.  It has excellent
> transparent Comet/Websockets support and Michael Connors has built a
> chat client using that:
> http://michaelconnors.net/article/367/mod-chat

That is all very good, and looks quite promising, but for a newbie
like me, the tutorials / samples section seems pretty sparse.

> In terms of scalability the team is working on Elastic Zotonic which
> will support distribution of a site and content across multiple
> servers.  Unless you have outrageous amounts of visitors you won't
> need this.  Zotonic makes incredibly efficient use of system resources
> through in-memory caching of query results.
>
> See examples:
> http://zotonic.com/
> http://totally-erlang.com/
> http://www.timbenniks.nl/
> http://scherpenisse.net/
> http://pelleasselbergs.nl/
> http://joreelsiegel.nl/
> http://goudentonamsterdam.nl/
> http://www.afhaal.nl/
> http://miffy.whatwebwhat.com/
> http://australie.timbenniks.nl/
> http://verafin.com/
>
> All of the above (except http://verafin.com/) are running on a single server.
>
> If you want an effective solution for building websites and web
> applications, then Zotonic is your secret weapon.
>

Once again, thank you for the response.