[erlang-questions] Erlang is the best choice for building commercial application servers

[Felix Hamilton]

An interesting data point that might be relevant here is that I have seen
Erlang/OTP getting more traction in the 'big data' world recently. One
really nice architecture seems to be to use Erlang for 3C stuff (command,
control, and communications), something like 0mq to handle messaging, and
Python (or something with similar user friendliness, readability, and
popularity) to do user facing stuff and provide user scripting
capabilities. This seems like a *really* powerful combination to me, and
one that has arisen spontaneously in very disparate areas with completely
unconnected developers. As a user of both Erlang and Python, there really
doesnt seem to be a lot of overlap between the two, and using both buys
pretty comprehensive problem space coverage cheaply and cleanly. The disco
project ( http://discoproject.org/  ) is a great example most folks might
be familiar with, but many others seem to be mostly closed source or
'software as a service' deals so far. ;-)

Anyhow, that was a pretty interesting data point for me. You might not have
to convince folks to let you write everything in Erlang if you can let all
the user facing stuff use something they are more comfortable with and
focus on using Erlang for 3C (where it really shines in my opinion) ...

On a completely unrelated tangent, are there any Erlang modules that
interact with javascript visualization libraries like protovis (
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/ ) or d3.js (
http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ )? That might be interesting. Or are there
any nice open source Erlang based visualization libraries that generate web
embeddable, interactive svg graphics with all the standard charts and
graphs as well as good flexibility? I havent run across anything myself,
but good Erlang based data visualization tools would be a nice selling
point as well. Some very interesting discussion has been going on here
about interacting with the W3C DOM API directly in Erlang (mainly CSS and
HTML) to control browser rendering, but no one has mentioned doing so for
data visualization purposes (i.e. SVG elements) as far as I know ...

/Felix

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman@REDACTED>wrote:

> Edmond Begumisa wrote:
>
>> My impression is that it boils down to marketing.
>>
>> .Net gained acceptance in the business world fairly quickly by *both*
>> developers and managers.
>>
>> If Erricson were in the business of selling software (which they are
>> not), and put together a group of spin doctors with a fat budget, things
>> would be different.
>>
>
> The important part is "in the business of selling software."  The critical
> business consideration, when selecting infrastructure, is the level of
> continued support you can expect.  IBM is going to be around for a while,
> so is Microsoft.  If you prefer vendor independence, you can be pretty
> confident that C is going to be supported by someone, so is Apache.
>
> My sense is that the Erlang/OTP ecosystem has become pretty strong in
> recent years - enough so that, if Ericsson bailed out, Erlang would
> continue.  A few years back, that might not have been quite as good a
> gamble.  (Comments?)
>
>
>
>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>
>
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