[erlang-questions] cost of integrating 3rd party SW

[Per Melin]

2008/5/24 Ulf Wiger <ulf@REDACTED>:
> It's something that pops up every once in a while,
> e.g. in the Facebook chat server article: that combining
> Erlang with components written in other languages is
> hard.

As a consultant I see a lot of components built in-house at different
companies in different languages that use RDBMSs to interface with
each other and COTSs. Often it's the completely wrong tool for the
job, but it's used because it's easy. It doesn't matter if you mix
Java, C++, Ruby, Python, PHP, C# and Perl; they usually (always?) have
drivers/APIs to talk to the major RDBMSs, and you can assume that they
are well used and therefor (probably) stable.

When I read or hear someone talk about using Erlang as part of a
larger system the state of the RDBMS drivers usually comes into
question.

I'm currently trying to fit Erlang into one of these puzzles of
components that communicate through databases myself, and at least now
initially I'm feeling pain. Connecting to Oracle over ODBC on Linux
has so far been wobbly. Next to try is the Postgres driver, but at
version 0.1.x my expectations are low.