Two beautiful programs - or web programming made easy

[Joe Armstrong]

Two beautiful programs

For a long time one of my favorite Erlang program was this:

loop() ->
    receive
        F -> F(),
    loop()
    end.

It's nice because it does very little, but what is does is universal. It
enables mobile code.

Well now I can do this in Javascript.

The Javascript equivalent is:

   function onMessage(evt) {
      eval(evt.data);
   }

Where the data comes from a websocket.

Websockets are controlled with a simple API:

      websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri);
      websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) };
      websocket.onclose = function(evt) { onClose(evt) };
      websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) };

Linking a websocket and Erlang is pretty easy. So now I can write code like
this in
erlang

-module(demo1).
-export([start/1]).

start(Pid) ->
    Pid ! {eval, "document.body.innerHTML='';"},
    Pid ! {eval, "document.body.style.backgroundColor='#eeffaa';"},
    Pid ! {eval, "document.body.innerHTML+='<h1>Hello World</h1>'"},
    event_loop(Pid).

event_loop(Pid) ->
    receive
    Any ->
        io:format("??event loop:~p~n",[Any]),
        event_loop(Pid)
    end.

This code pushes asynchronous messages containing javascript to a generic
web page, and the web page evals the result.

This technique is amazingly powerful.

So now I only need one generic web page. Think of that.

Only one page is needed - forever.

All the generic pages does is:

loop:
   wait for a message containing Javascript
   eval the message

Beautiful

This is the easiest way to program a GUI I can conceive of.

You can download and run the examples from:

https://github.com/joearms/SEBG

You'll need something like Google chrome to run them.

Have fun

/Joe