[erlang-questions] web framework, db, architecture query, with requirements

[Alain O'Dea]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Icarus Alive <icarus.alive@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Alain O'Dea <alain.odea@REDACTED> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Icarus Alive <icarus.alive@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> Posted a question on Stackoverflow here: http://bit.ly/f3TIuo
>>> but this isn't exactly a cross-post, rather an Erlang specific
>>> extention of same :-) ... (to avoid any Erlang/Python religious wars,
>>> although Stackoverflow is pretty good in preventing such wars, from
>>> what I've seen).
>
> <snip>
>
>> Zotonic, the Erlang CMS at http://zotonic.com/ is a proven solution
>> for building fast AJAX/comet-driven websites.
>
> Thanks for the pointer to Zotonic. The feature set is quite
> impressive, however my understanding is that CMS is good where content
> needs to be seen by lots and lots of people, and you have lots of
> content to organize, make it searchable, classifiable etc. Just to
> clarify my requirement a bit further, this is for a rather niche
> service, where small groups of people have access to a fairly limited
> set of content, and that content changes quite frequently, i.e.
> content older than few days gets purged. And there are possibly
> hundreds of thousands of such small groups. Would you say a CMS is
> good for such application ?
>
>
>>  A big plus for me is
>> that the resulting sites are easy for non-technical people to maintain
>> once you hand it off.
>
> That is indeed a good thing to have, though for my purpose I am still
> not quite sure how it will be used.
>
>> It's lightning fast, easy to build on and easy to deeply extend.  It's
>> AJAX support is entirely JQuery-driven which fits your bill and makes
>> it generally easier to work with and extend.  It has excellent
>> transparent Comet/Websockets support and Michael Connors has built a
>> chat client using that:
>> http://michaelconnors.net/article/367/mod-chat
>
> That is all very good, and looks quite promising, but for a newbie
> like me, the tutorials / samples section seems pretty sparse.
>
>> In terms of scalability the team is working on Elastic Zotonic which
>> will support distribution of a site and content across multiple
>> servers.  Unless you have outrageous amounts of visitors you won't
>> need this.  Zotonic makes incredibly efficient use of system resources
>> through in-memory caching of query results.
>>
>> See examples:
>> http://zotonic.com/
>> http://totally-erlang.com/
>> http://www.timbenniks.nl/
>> http://scherpenisse.net/
>> http://pelleasselbergs.nl/
>> http://joreelsiegel.nl/
>> http://goudentonamsterdam.nl/
>> http://www.afhaal.nl/
>> http://miffy.whatwebwhat.com/
>> http://australie.timbenniks.nl/
>> http://verafin.com/
>>
>> All of the above (except http://verafin.com/) are running on a single server.
>>
>> If you want an effective solution for building websites and web
>> applications, then Zotonic is your secret weapon.
>>
>
> Once again, thank you for the response.
>

Zotonic has been used to manage hundreds of thousands of pages, but
I'm not sure how you would handle that many users from a configuration
perspective.  I have copied this thread to Zotonic-Users on Google
Groups to see what the Zotonic community thinks.

Given your use case, you may be better building a lot directly with
Nitrogen.  Zotonic is built primarily on Nitrogen and Webmachine so in
the worst case you can take advantage of its code base as an example
of how to leverage them.

Documentation is admittedly a big gap for Zotonic.  Lloyd R. Prentice
created a FLOSS manual for it with some shell content and I have been
working with him to populate it with tutorials and guides.