[erlang-questions] REST server

Garry Hodgson garry@REDACTED
Tue Mar 8 19:31:52 CET 2016


I can't speak to ease of building user interfaces, as we're building
web security components. We started off using Webmachine, and
were pretty happy with it. But some of our REST services were sending
very large messages, and the memory consumption of Webmachine,
which uses strings, became a big problem. Cowboy uses binaries
instead, and was a much more comfortable fit.  We also need to
implement various binary protocols, and being able to do so using
Cowboy's underlying Ranch acceptor pools was a big win.

Converting Webmachine apps to Cowboy apps was pretty straightforward,
and Cowboy feels like a more mature and feature rich Webmachine. As
you evaluate your options, I'd consider these as two implementations
of the Webmachine model, and go with the Cowboy implementation if
you choose that route.




On 3/7/16 2:46 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
> Thanks, Loïc, I will then check out Cowboy in more detail, to see how 
> it feels.
>
> regards,
> Vlad
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 8:44 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED 
> <mailto:essen@REDACTED>> wrote:
>
>     On 03/07/2016 08:27 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
>
>         Hi!
>
>         I am an almost complete noob regarding this, so please excuse
>         me if I am
>         asking questions with obvious answers.
>
>         I have an application that I'd like to expose via a REST api.
>         From what
>         I could find quickly, in the Erlang world it looks like the
>         main options
>         are Webmachine and Cowboy.
>
>         Does anyone have any advice on which one fits better my
>         requirements, as
>         below?
>
>         - the server must be embeddable in another application, i.e.
>         possible to
>         start/stop without a release
>
>
>     No problem for that with Cowboy, either through a function call or
>     provided child specs.
>
>         - it must be possible to configure it to use a dynamic port value
>         (multiple independent servers may run on the same machine)
>
>
>     No problem, set {port, 0} option and then call ranch:get_port/1.
>
>         - the REST API is delegating to an Erlang API, so ease of
>         implementation
>         would be nice :-)
>
>
>     Cowboy is inspired by Webmachine so I suppose they're pretty close
>     for this one.
>
>         - if it is possible to run multiple servers on the same Erlang
>         runtime,
>         then it would be a big plus
>
>
>     No problem, just declare more than one listener and you're good!
>
>     -- 
>     Loïc Hoguin
>     http://ninenines.eu
>     Author of The Erlanger Playbook,
>     A book about software development using Erlang
>
>
>
>
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