[erlang-questions] your first choice?

[zxq9]

On 2015年2月16日 月曜日 16:06:45 Peter J Etheridge wrote:
> dear erlangers,
> with my plan to build a web app (a yapp was what i had in mind) i have
> been studying tools.
> there seems to be general agreement on rebar. but which should i
> choose;yaws or mochiweb?mnesia or mongoDB?chicago boss or ...?XML or
> JSon?intellij idea or eclipse?and before i buy a server, Win or Linux
> or ...? while whatever i study seems ok, it is all taking a lot of
> time and keeping me from coding in erlang.there is some good info on
> the web, but i value your opinions more.understanding you will be
> required to maintain your app, if you were starting from scratch,
> which choice would you make first?appreciative thanks,peter

YAWS on some open source Unixy OS.

The OS will be free to mess with, containerize, migrate among hosts, be 
familiar to anyone you might want to work together with, etc. YAWS requires 
only knowing one language on the server-side, one environment that constitutes 
the entire web "stack" (written in the same language you'll use for server-
side app development), and is the shortest route to the "hello, world" stage 
from which your application development can be incremental tweaks.

As you learn more under YAWS you may decide for whatever reason that some 
other server system is better suited to your style of thought or to your 
problem, and if you develop your server-side stuff in a way that doesn't 
entangle it with YAWS directly then moving isn't that hard anyway. In any 
case, you're unlikely to get a non-trivial application built right the first 
time. If YAWS turns out to suck for some reason, at least you'll know what 
points of pain you're looking to alleviate on the next try and won't have 
spent an inordinate amount of time messing with application interaction 
mysteries since YAWS is pretty much a self-contained system written with just 
one purpose in mind.

In my opinion "web stacks" that are anything larger than two layers deep (as 
in [Server, YourStuff]) are generally a bad idea because one often to winds up 
spending more time dicking with the medium than the message. Unfortunately JS 
is going to continue to be a joke and is the only real option client-side, but 
its better than nothing and websockets have alleviated a major point of 
ridiculousness that existed for over a decade.

My 2c.

-Craig