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

[Alain O'Dea]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Alain O'Dea <alain.odea@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Icarus Alive <icarus.alive@REDACTED> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> Zotonic has been used to manage hundreds of thousands of pages, but
> I'm not sure how you would handle that many users from a configuration
> perspective.  I have copied this thread to Zotonic-Users on Google
> Groups to see what the Zotonic community thinks.

CORRECTION:  I did not intend to send the statement about hundreds of
thousands of pages.  I have no source for it yet.  I remember reading
it on zotonic-users but I cannot find that.  Disregard that until I
find the source :) Thanks.

>
> Given your use case, you may be better building a lot directly with
> Nitrogen.  Zotonic is built primarily on Nitrogen and Webmachine so in
> the worst case you can take advantage of its code base as an example
> of how to leverage them.
>
> Documentation is admittedly a big gap for Zotonic.  Lloyd R. Prentice
> created a FLOSS manual for it with some shell content and I have been
> working with him to populate it with tutorials and guides.
>