[erlang-questions] Misultin EOL

[Edmond Begumisa]

Hi,

I have a small quibble (not trying to flame here), but isn't a comparison  
between Yaws and Mutlisin a case of apples and oranges?
	
 From a developer's perspective, Yaws is a webserver in the Apache+PHP  
sense or IIS+.Net sense. Mutlisin (Mochiweb/Cowboy) are web server  
libraries in the libmicrohttpd sense. Nitrogen, Erlang-web and Erlyweb are  
web-frameworks in the Django/CakePHP sense. While webmachine is uniquely  
on its own.

Yaws is about *serving* dynamic and static *content*? You'd consider using  
Cowboy & Co' to develop "a yaws" if you were starting a yaws-like project  
afresh in 2012. While you'd consider using yaws to develop a new  
django-like framework for Erlang.

I'm yet to come across an Erlang web-server that is in the Yaws category  
that has it's features and thoughtful design. I know of only Inets that's  
also in this category.

So I always find it curious when Yaws is lumped into discussions where  
it's strengths and focus don't fit at all.

Addressing some of your concerns:

Modularity - If you think of yaws as a web-application server that never  
goes down and can run many applications, you'd find that it's very very  
modular (appmonds/yapps). If it's modularity of the code-base itself that  
your referring to, well, it doesn't look bad to me. I learned Erlang  
largely by reading Yaws source code.

Usability - Development with yaws is the reverse of the popular web-libs.  
You use yaws to "serve", cache, log and session manage one or more of your  
web-apps (dynamic and static content) as opposed to using  
Mutlisin/Mochiweb/Cowboy to write a web-app that serves, caches, and logs  
itself and manages it's own sessions.

(In)activity - I personally haven't found many features that I've wanted  
to be added to yaws itself, so it could be a case of feature saturation  
rather than an under-developed legacy code-base. Most things that don't  
exist, you can use from your app code without it being in yaws coz of the  
way it's designed. For instance, I don't much like yaws' dynamic content  
creation features (ehtml/ssi/yssi). Instead, I frequently use the ErlTL  
template module from Erlyweb (without erlyweb).

That said, sometimes, for some projects, I find yaws overkill and reach  
for one of the newer light webserver libs (usually when the app needs to  
expose a simple web-API). But for most web projects with lots of content  
(and where development time is scarce), I find using those libs would have  
me duplicating a lot of the great work already done in yaws, so I reach  
for yaws instead.

- Edmond -




On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:06:44 +1100, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED>  
wrote:

> On 02/16/2012 01:17 PM, Steve Vinoski wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED>  
>> wrote:
>>>  Is cowboy going to be able to take the lead on HTTP Erlang web server  
>>> performance where mochiweb and yaws have been unable to (please don't  
>>> bother to flame this, those people that don't care about performance,  
>>> but care about Erlang)?
>> I'm not interested in flames either, but I am interested in facts.
>> Please back up your assertion by posting your meaningful benchmarks
>> that prove that Yaws is lacking in performance.
>>
>> thanks,
>> --steve
>
> It is unfair to say that yaws does not perform like misultin and I do  
> not have data to make that statement.  When I think of performance, I am  
> also thinking of software development performance for modifying,  
> extending, and using the code-base.  Yaws has lacked support once  
> mochiweb was available because of some fragmentation within the  
> community.  From what I have seen, yaws chooses not to focus on  
> performance, and has never intended to do so in the past, so it is  
> unclear whether it would be able to maintain its performance in the  
> future, if it received more support (based on  
> http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2011/05/09/erlang-web-server-benchmarking/).   
> So, that was misleading for me to say, since you are probably correct  
> that misultin is on par with yaws, though there are no public results to  
> show that.  With yaws the concern seems to be more about the code being  
> regarded as legacy, not actively developed, and not modular (and  
> whatever other reasons that seemed to make mochiweb
> appear necessary).  I say this knowing that you are currently the main  
> maintainer of the code-base.  These are just the impressions I have had  
> from being within the Erlang community for a few years.
>
> - Michael
>
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