[erlang-questions] Is erlang a web language?

[Edwin Fine]

2009/2/14 Dale Harvey <harveyd@REDACTED>

>
>
> 2009/2/14 Wojciech Kaczmarek <kaczmarek.w@REDACTED>
>
> 2009/2/13 Dmitrii Dimandt <dmitriid@REDACTED>
>>
>>>
>>> That's exactly what fess was talking about. Had you not mentioned these
>>> projects, no one would ever discover them (well, I would, but I run a
>>> Russian Erlang-related-news site, so I scour the web, blogs and mailing
>>> lists for news and bits and pieces of info)
>>>
>>> Erlang should really get a repositroy that is as ubiquitous and as easy
>>> to use as Ruby's gem or Perl's CPAN. Yes, there is a lot of utter crap in
>>> those repositories, but they are valuable for the fact that you can easily
>>> search and instal necessary modules.
>>>
>>> For instance, I can name at least three mutually incompatible JSON
>>> encoding/decoding libraries written for erlang (there are at least 5, I
>>> think). Definitely at least two libraries dealing with utf-8. Two OpenID
>>> projects. Two dedicated wrappers for traditional RDBMs (and a third, which
>>> is a more general ORM-style library). At least three (I think) projects that
>>> connect to Amazon's web services in one way or another. Two projects
>>> interfacing with memcached. And the list *will* grow. These are just
>>> projects I can name off the top of my head
>>>
>>> "Let a hundred flowers blossom" (c) Mao Zedong
>>>
>>> Quite often I don't think that authors of some of these project even now
>>> that similar projects exist. Forget the users, they will *never* even
>>> discover some of them :)
>>>
>>
>> Hello,
>> 3 cents from a perspective of someone who did a lot of searching of
>> quality 3rd-party Erlang software during last two years, for the purposes of
>> r&d first and later for the production use in a startup.
>>
>> Centralized repository is tempting (I missed it at the beginning), but it
>> also requires lots of Q&A work. It can be obvious for anybody who
>> participated in maintaining some Linux of *BSD distribution. Also it can
>> reveal specific social incompatibilies between users, as they needs vary
>> more than most of people would like to admit. And it's not very good for the
>> perception of the community to start a centralized service which will fail
>> later.
>>
>> The simpler step is to make searching easier. A website aggregating some
>> automatically-retrieved info (from googlecode, github, sourceforge) with a
>> human-entered content (by those  authors who'd like to care about it) comes
>> to mind. The results could be sorted somehow, with a raw google search
>> output as a last resort. Something like that could be plugged into Planet
>> Erlang.
>>
>> There's no silver bullet when it comes to managing external software. In
>> production you usually want to stick with carefully chosen and often patched
>> specific versions of 3rd party stuff, otherwise you easily introduce a new
>> point of failure and make the release management pain in the ass. I'm very
>> happy that  Erlang is the first language making a sane conenction between
>> HA-world, where you think about your production environment in a very
>> specific way, and the usual "opensource libraries for all, let's grab it"
>> approach.
>
>
> I registered erldocs.com with the intention of doing pretty much exactly
> that. right now I am waiting on the ability to fully generate the erlang
> documentation from source, then I was planning to improve usability /
> searchability, then on importing documentation of open source 3rd party libs
>
> however I am a bit torn because
> http://erlware.org/documentation/index.html
> does a large amount of what I was planning to do, the frontend could be
> improved quite a lot, but its a good start.
>
> So i think it comes down to, why arent people using faxien / sinan?, I
> tried them
> out a while ago and had some teething issues, however they seem to
> stabilising
> recently, I am going to give it a bit more of a thorough look and try
> packaging
> some applications for it. are there any core reasons why people dont use
> it, or
> was it purely a maturity issue.
>

I am using sinan/faxien exclusively, and have installed and maintained four
Erlang production systems with them. There were some teething issues, some
of which were very annoying to the point that some people stopped using the
software, but I soldiered on and the software is improving. Even with the
bugs and problems, it's a while lot better than the make-based solution I
was using before. I really hope that Faxien and Sinan make it because they
are closer to what I want in a build/distribution system for Erlang than
anything else I have used, even with their current limitations. I wish the
whole OTP was distributed like this.


> (just to note, it isnt a centralised repository, you can setup your own
> public
> and private repos)
>
>
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> -- Wojtek
>>
>>
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