[erlang-questions] Is erlang a web language?

[Joe Armstrong]

2009/2/11 Yang Zhang <getyourcontacts@REDACTED>:
> Thanks all for replying.
>
> Just think erlang's database and distribute feature are so great so it is
> the best way I can think to make a distribute crawler and web page
> analyzor(what I am doing), then found it doesn't have strong built in web
> library like urlencode/htmlentities for me to process url and html. And it
> builtin httpclient even ibrowse doesn't support bind IP when initial http
> request.
>
> Never mind a function is complex or easy, what in my mind is erlang didn't
> have it so it  is incomplete.

But it does - I leave it to you as an exercise in Googling to find
such routines.

I read your initial mail and did a Quick google search and quickly
found *exactly*
what you wanted - at least I think it was what you wanted.

No language serves up library code to you on a plate with no effort involved.
I've recently written a load of javascript - here there is a plethora
of library code
a very quick Google searches reveals what I want.

After a while I found it was better to learn javascript *properly*
than waste time
looking for library functions. Even if you find a library function it
is unlikely that it will do *exactly* what you want - so you have to
read the code
and fix it in any case.

At the end of the day most good programmers end up writing the code they want
because it is *quicker* than searching in vain for library code that
may or may not work and may of may not do what they want. Even if they
find the code they cannot
be sure that it is 100% correct.

This is just life - even if you find library A that has what you want,
library A might
depend upon B. And C which you also want might also might depend upon
B (but perhaps, *a different version of B*) - this happens so often
that after about a year
it becomes completely impossible to recompile the latest version of some code
in your favorite operating system because all the dependencies are buggered up.

The only known way of connecting things in a future proof way is to isolate them
through message passing interfaces with defined protocols.

If you find the fabelled "web language" let us know - I have never seen anything
remotely usable - every single framework and library I have tried is
deeply flawed in one way or another. Some things are easy, other
things hard.

In Erlang making a fault-tolerant fail-over database is not impossibly
difficuly  -
writing urldecode might be a pain - but as they say "no pain no gain"

If we take (for example PHP) I imagine writing urldecode is a no-brainer
- but writing a fault-tolerent database with hot standby might just be on the
tricky side.

Have a nice day

/Joe Armstrong

> No one like to write the simple code again and
> again. And I'm not sure I could write it right one the first time i wrote
> it. Glad see it has another library to compensate the missing ones so
> everything is ok now.
>
> Thanks. I will check these links.
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 2:27 AM, Taavi Talvik <taavi@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 11, 2009, at 6:46 PM, Yang Zhang wrote:
>>
>>> I saw eralng has its own webserver and distribute database. These
>>> looks quite good.
>>> But after I wrote some web programs, I found erlang even doesn't have
>>> a strong enough htmlentities or urlencode , urldecode function. What's
>>> the problem here?
>>> Isnot erlang a web language?
>>
>> htmlentities, urlencode/decode are easy part. Supplied by
>> any erlang web frameworks.
>>
>> It starts to be interesting there:
>>
>> Web chatroom in 57 lines:
>> http://nitrogenproject.com/web/samples/comet2
>>
>> Million connections:
>>
>> http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-1/
>>
>> putting data into cloud:
>> http://couchdb.apache.org/
>> http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
>>
>> wikipedia on on fraction of hardware:
>> http://www.onscale.de/scalaris.html
>> http://www.onscale.de/Schuett_Google_Scalability.pdf
>>
>> best regards,
>> taavi
>
>
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