[erlang-questions] Is Erlang a good tool for this particular project?

[Mike Oxford]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Joel Meyer <joel.meyer@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 7:16 AM, Matthew Hillsborough
> <matthew.hillsborough@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Thanks for posting links to this. Surprised Joe A. did not mention it in
>> his post, it has him listed as an author. :)
>> Just from a quick glimpse, this appears to be using MochiWeb, which is
>> completely HTTP based. I am not entirely sure if that's the route I am
>
> Out of curiosity, is there a reason you wouldn't use thrift or protocol
> buffers? Even if you don't use their RPC mechanisms, you could use one of
> those as the serialized form for message passing (over plain sockets, if you
> so desire). I think a binary serialization format will still be more compact
> than JSON and faster to deserialize as well.

Both of your points are true, but thrift and protobufs both have hard-IDLs.
There are games you can play with non-IDL-based protocols (without
giving up security) that you simply cannot do with binary protocols unless
you force a client upgrade with the new IDL.

-mox