[erlang-questions] newbie web-development advice / guidance

[OvermindDL1]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Icarus Alive <icarus.alive@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 7:43 PM, OvermindDL1 <overminddl1@REDACTED> wrote:
>> For note, my background is also 15+ years of C++, and although it and Erlang
>> are different, C++ templates are very much similar to Erlangs syntax (and
>> dang near identical to Haskell), so if you were a heavy template writer like
>> I am then think of it that way.  I jumped into Erlang and picked it up very
>> quickly.
>
> @OvermindDL1, very glad to hear that. Not familiar with Haskell, but
> C++ templates are a familiar territory.
>
>> Oh, and I use Nitrogen, mostly as I like to generate pages in code and theme
>> and layout using css; I try to use as little straight html as possible, but
>> using html directly is something Zotonic if good at if you prefer that.
>>
>> I can help with your C++ to Erlang mental conversions if you want.
>
> That would be really a great help. However, if you (or anyone else
> here) had a chance to compare Nitrogen & Zotonic on the developer
> efficiency and learning-curve aspects, would be good to hear. Also,
> how does it compare in performance terms, i.e. programmatic HTML
> generation in Erlang code, versus template driven HTML generation
> using a dedicated templating engine (if I understood it correctly).

I have not yet used Zotonic myself, but from what I gather they do
about the same things but in different ways.

It seems Nitrogen likes to generate web pages in code, although it can
use templates.
It seems Zotonic likes to generate web pages in templates, although it
can use code.
Zotonic seems to have a few more features then Nitrogen, but are
easily made in Nitrogen thanks to its pure-code extension system.

I chose Nitrogen because I prefer code to generate pages, my pages are
mostly informational server stuff, so I do not need an html kid to do
those things for me, but if you had one, maybe Zotonic?

Both are quite fast, even the templates (from my understanding) are
compiled to Erlang compiled beam files so there should not be any real
difference.


On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Jon Watte <jwatte@REDACTED> wrote:
> The "web" pages I've written in Erlang are mostly just status and management
> REST interfaces for a system whose main goal is something else, but what
> I've found so far:
>
> If you want a web interface where you take the request once headers are
> parsed and the request decoded, use mochiweb.
>
> If you want an industrial-strength HTTP protocol server stack (things like
> content type negotiation, etc) for a REST-only implementation, use
> webmachine.

Exactly.  Nitrogen/Zotonic are good for making the more direct
'website' kind of interface, but for making web services, something
raw like mochiweb/cowboy or webmachine (webmachine excels at REST more
then anything else) are better.