[erlang-questions] Misultin EOL

[Garrett Smith]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Benoit Chesneau <bchesneau@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Andrew Berman <rexxe98@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I think a lot of issues with APIs would be solved if we had something
>> analogous to Java interfaces in Erlang.  Behaviors just don't cut it.  I
>> want something that is a replica of interfaces.  Then all the Erlang guys
>> have to do is create the interface and then people can create whatever
>> implementations they want and I never have to worry about changing my code!
>>
> In python world we have WSGI that define a common spec to interface
> Python application with the web. Defining how server should handle
> requests to and return response from applications. Also defining how
> the requests/responses should be formatted for the apps.
>
> There are many servers and many libs/frameworks handling the spec.
> Only the code quality, the technical differences and features distinct
> them.  I guess somethng like that could be defined in Erlang with a
> lib reference to test the validaty and validate servers and libs
> behaviour (just like wsgiref in Python). Same exist with Rack in ruby
> world and probably in other language.
>
> Maybe that something that could be done. It would at least simplify a
> lot the work of apps developers.

WSGI is one of most successful middle layer implementation I've seen for HTTP.

By success, I mean the amount of code written around the spec. For the
most part, the entire Python web ecosystem, which is very rich, was
spawned by this spec.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0444/

Some of what's been discussed in this thread (cookies, sessions, etc),
IMO, belongs at a higher level -- which is easily supported with a
good HTTP middleware layer.

FWIW, this exists today in the "mod" API for Erlang's own httpd
server. It's not a standard -- it's horrifyingly complicated -- but it
is representative of a WSGI style middle ware layer.

Garrett