Announce: elib1

[Joe Armstrong]

Announcing elib1

Elib1 was released today.

Tomorrow I will present it at the Stockholm Erlounge.

Elib1 is a library of Erlang modules and set of applications which use
the modules.

The Elib1 project now moves into phase 2

The phases of the project are:

    Phase 1: Define and implement a basic structure
             and a small number of applications
    Phase 2: Make project open source
    Phase 3: Write books

Each phase will take about 2-3 years.

The first attempt at a library contains modules for the following:

    xml parsing
    fast tuple I/O (to disk)
    full-text indexing
    http parsing
    telnet server
    json parsing
    porter stemming
    mysql native interface
    sha1
    similar file locator
    screen manipulation
    miscellaneous missing functions (which should be in the standard libraries)
    accurate tagging of Erlang so it can be turned into browsable HTML
    (and more ...)

The applications are divided it two areas. Supported and unsupported

In supported:

    indexer      - a full text indexing engine (this is the of near
production quality)
    irc          - and irc kit (includes a TCL wish interface)
(somewhat incomplete)
    tagger       - an application to turn erlang into browsable HTML
    drivers      - example linked in and port drivers (currently broken)
    midi_drivers - mac os X only
    website      - a webserver (used internally)
    versions     - a way of munging module names to make them secure

In unsupported:

   epeg     - a peg grammar and parser combinators
   folding  - Javascript folding editor/organiser (needs some work,
not erlang :-)
   jpeg     - image transformation in Erlang
   xml      - some xml stuff

I have attempted to use "best practise" in making the library. Using
the dialyzer, eunit and edoc.

This code is far from perfect or polished - but the basic way things
fit together
is defined.

Rather than have 500 small libraries each with a few users and a few
routines I'd
like to see one library with a much large number of tightly integrated routines.

The code is available at:

http://github.com/joearms/elib1

/Joe Armstrong