Language Bindings for Erlang Again

[Torbjorn Tornkvist]

Yariv Sadan wrote:
>> The other point of view is to open Erlang to other language, because
>> what is to notice about Erlang? Everybody says that it's a very
>> attractive language, but as far as I can see, it is very few used.
>> This is the paradox of Erlang.
>> For example, there is now millions of web site, but who knows one site
>> written in Erlang?
> 
> 
> I know of a site: http://yaws.hyber.org/ :)
> 
> Seriously, though, I have wondered about the same question. If Erlang
> is so well suited for distributed applications (which are most
> non-trivial web applications), why is it not more popular? My theory
> is that the barrier to entry is too high. If you're a PHP programmer,
> there just isn't an easy way for you to hit the ground running if you
> want to create a web app in Erlang. You have to invest quite a lot of
> time into learning Erlang, OTP, Mnesia and Yaws, and all together this
> is quite intimidating.
> 
> I think Erlang would get much more popular if it had a framework
> similar to Ruby on Rails. Before Ruby on Rails, relatively few
> programmers have used Ruby, but the success of Ruby on Rails  has made
> the Ruby language quite popular. I think the same can happen with
> Erlang if Erlang had such a framework.
> 
> As a first step towards such a framework, I thought about writing a
> script that would take a .hrl file, parse its record definitions
> (representing database objects), and then generate all the code
> required to set up a simple web app using Mnesia and Yaws.

That is something I've been thinking of for quite a while 
now. I even started an embryo for a framework ('yfront' in
jungerl) and played around with Javascript libraries ('js'
in jungerl).

--Tobbe

> This would
> help newcomers overcome the initial barrier to entry for Erlang web
> development.
> 
> That's my 2c :)
> 
> Yariv
>