[erlang-questions] Erlang http servers

[Loïc Hoguin]

Biased Cowboy author here. If I got the wrong idea about another project 
please correct me. :)

On 09/30/2012 11:29 PM, Serge Aleynikov wrote:
> So why don't
> all the authors of those wonderful alternative libraries just patch the
> inets to extend it with something they feel missing so that we only have
> one good and documented library to use as the common denominator?

Because it's not about what's missing, but about how you use it, how it 
works and what you can do with it.

You could probably classify the servers into two groups, inets+yaws 
being monolithic servers with many features (that can be 
ignored/stripped down, at least for yaws) and with a more traditional 
configuration file based approach (unless you run yaws embedded), and 
mochiweb+misultin+cowboy being in the lightweight family, being pretty 
much bare bone HTTP (except mochiweb has a few extra unrelated modules 
like JSON).

Note that mochiweb is in maintenance mode and misultin has been dropped 
in favor of cowboy.

Cowboy itself has a focus on reduced memory use (uses binary), reduced 
latency, has long-polling and Websocket support (SPDY soon), while 
trying to stay close to OTP principles (long-polling/websocket 
connections will be special processes in the next version allowing you 
to use sys: and friends to debug your code, the handler modules are 
inspired by gen_server, everything is supervised, and so on). It also 
has Webmachine-inspired REST support.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
Erlang Cowboy
Nine Nines
http://ninenines.eu