[erlang-questions] Beginners tutorials

[rambocoder]

Joe,

When I first heard about node, this book provided a gentle introduction by
developing a web based calculator:

http://www.packtpub.com/toc/node-web-development-table-contents

The book is based on Node 0.4, so none of the examples will work out of the
box with current node.

The book started with canonical "Hello World" example, then it progressed
by introducing a package manager and a section on how to make the "Hello
World" app run as a daemon and have it autostart on a Linux server (similar
to your http://www.sics.se/~joe/tutorials/web_server/web_server.html). I
really liked the book's guide on "daemonizing" the basic node server
(init.d script + forever) because it was such an easy win and within
minutes I had the example running on my Linode.
http://www.railstutorial.org/book/beginning a Ruby on Rails tutorial that
does something similar by not just introducing ROR in the first chapter,
but also getting me started with rvm, gem, git workflow and the free Heroku
tier, so by the end of the chapter you have a basic hello world ROR
application running on Heroku.

After the "Hello World" example, the Node Web Development book shows how to
render a basic table of contents web page with several calculator URLs.
Each calculator URL is another example of generating HTML this time with a
form and some injected values using string replace, no template language
yet.

Then the book proceeds to show how to do routing of URLs and parsing query
strings, how to handle POST parameters and return results of calculations
using just node, no 3rd party libraries.

Once the basic calculator is developed, the author asks: "What complete web
server features are missing?" and introduces Connect middleware. Logic code
of the calculator remains intact, but web server startup and routing code
get's rewritten to use Connect in addition to adding Connect's static
content handling and Connect's logger. Once Connect based calculator is
running, he introduces Express web framework and EJS templating engine,
changing string based HTML generation into an EJS templates, rewriting
routing into parametrized Express based routing and he adds Error pages.

Before Cowboy, Misultin was all the rage, it provided short and sweet
examples of simple applications in one Erlang file
https://code.google.com/p/misultin/wiki/ExamplesPage and before Misultin,
Mochiweb was the go to web server for one pager examples, such as
http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-1
and in Kevin Smith's screencasts
http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-kserl/source_code Episode 6, Adding REST
using Mochiweb

Cowboy "Hello World" can also be presented as 1 file, check out Elixir's
Plug Hello World example,
https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug/blob/master/README.md#hello-world

I think it would be awesome to have an erlang tutorial that would teach how
to build a web app while doing a compare and contrast to nodejs code.

Cheers,

rambocoder



On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:

> Re: Garrett's great talk at EUC2014
>
> The point has been made many times before that
> "There are no easy Erlang getting started guides"
>
> So I thought I'd take a look at Node.js.
>
> The node js home page (node.js) starts with a simple example
>
>
> <quote>
> var http = require('http');
> http.createServer(function (req, res) {
>   res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
>   res.end('Hello World\n');
> }).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');
> console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');
>
> To run the server, put the code into a file example.js and execute it with
> the node program from the command line:
>
> % node example.js
> Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/
> </endquote>
>
> It's pretty easy to knock up an almost identical example in Erlang - using
> any of the well-known web
> servers in the background, unfortunately this has not been done, or if it
> has been done
> it's not easy to find the examples (or if there are examples I can't find
> them)
>
> I was vaguely thinking of making some examples that are more-or-less
> isomorphic to the
> node.js examples and then applying small transformation steps to turn then
> from idiomatic node.js code to idiomatic Erlang code.
>
> Although I could find a simple hello world example in node.js I could not
> find a tutorial that
> started with a simple example and then built on it in very small steps
> adding routing, authentication,
> database access and so on.
>
> Does anybody know of some examples of node.js that could be used for this.
>
> Cheers
>
> /Joe
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20140612/4b52314a/attachment.htm>