New Traffic Records

Posted by Yariv on August 25, 2006

The picture says it all.





This is weird.

When I started blogging about Erlang, I enjoyed being in a small niche of bloggers that write about “exotic” languages. I’ve never thought my blog would get all this attention. Sometimes, I don’t like all this attention :) However, you don’t always get in life what you’ve expected, so I’ll do my best to enjoy the ride.

Erlang is just getting started. Erlang will make huge strides into the web development world. We will build frameworks that make Erlang developer’s lives easy, if not easier, than those of Ruby on Rails developers. Ruby on Rails didn’t exist two years ago, and Erlang (with Yaws) is years ahead of where Ruby was when Rails was born. In a matter of months, Erlang will be a serious contender in the web development world — not just for developers who want insane scalability with 3 milliseconds downtime per year — but also for developers who just want to get things done.

Real-time interactivity on the web is a relatively unexploited land full of opportunities for adventerous developers. These days, building real-time interactive applications with Comet technology in any language but Erlang just makes no sense. Erlang has 20 years of development behind it with the specific design goal of building scalable servers. No other language comes close. It also makes development fun.

As Joe Armstrong has said, Erlangers have a head start.

Libraries are coming.

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  1. Frank Fri, 25 Aug 2006 04:47:40 EDT

    looking for it ;)

  2. Damir Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:23:33 EDT

    Speaking about web development with erlang, can one use html templates? Or is it just embedding html into out/1 (for now anyway… ;-) ?

  3. Byron Fri, 25 Aug 2006 13:08:06 EDT

    The Yaws webserver provides php/asp-like embedded dynamic html content.

  4. Byron Fri, 25 Aug 2006 13:08:09 EDT

    Damir, here is some info on that.

  5. Byron Fri, 25 Aug 2006 13:12:12 EDT

    Darnit, network problems, sorry ’bout that. The second version with two links is the one I meant to post.

  6. Anders Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:26:29 EDT

    I’ve been fascinated with Erlang from a distance for a while now but recently committed myself to actually learning it well enough to write some non-trivial applications so I can really get a feel for whether it lives up to its promise.

    I’ve been blogging my progress here: http://thraxil.org/users/anders/

    So far I’m really enjoying it. Some of the enjoyment may just be that I enjoy learning almost anything new, but at least nothing I’ve encountered yet in Erlang has made me cringe or really lessened my enjoyment.

    Since I primarily do web development I’m keeping my eyes open for CRUD type frameworks in Erlang. Yaws is certainly already a solid basis for one.

    What I still haven’t found in Erlang:

    • like Damir, I want some kind of html templating system. ehtml would be fine if I was the only one working on a project but realistically, I need to be able to have non-programmer designers building the templates. For that, XML attribute based systems like ZPT or Kid have been ideal.
    • some sort of functional equivalent to ActiveRecord/ORM for dealing with legacy SQL databases without having to write lots of SQL by hand for basic CRUD operations. Mnesia looks really impressive, but it would be a hard sell for a lot of organizations to get them off their existing mysql/postgres/oracle installs.
    • a markdown, textile, and/or reST library. should be easy.
    • a canonical tutorial on how to safely handle unicode in Erlang. My understanding is that some of the standard library isn’t safe.

    Other than that, it looks like all the pieces are already there for a framework that could kick some serious ass.

  7. Anders Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:29:30 EDT

    Oh, and full perl5 regexp syntax support.

  8. Yariv Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:58:43 EDT

    Guys, it’s great to hear of other programmers deciding to adopt Yaws and voicing their real-world needs. Keep it up — it will be rewarding.

    The DB abstraction layer is in the pipeline :)

  9. Niklas Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:50:01 EDT

    Yariv, Thanks for all intressting posts about Erlang!

    A year a go I was introduced to Erlang. We used it in a AI project at the IT university of Gothenburg (Sweden). The task was to create teams of intelligent robots playing soccer, all implemented i Erlang with ERESYE (a tool for the realization of intelligent systems using the Erlang language).

    At that point I feelt that there was few (very few) people in the World knowing about Erlang. So it’s an agreeable piece of news to see that things actually seems to happen know. A web development framework and standardized components which handle common web related activities is just what we need to make Erlang a popular web development language (afterall Erlang was first used for developing web based applications soon after it was invented.)

  10. Yariv Sat, 26 Aug 2006 07:03:40 EDT

    Thanks Niklas. In the coming months, I’m going to be going full steam, building a webapp in Erlang and releasing all framework level code as open source. I think it’s about time Erlang picks up some real momentum in the web framework department because less “worthy” languages have outpaced it in the past two years :)

    I’m confident Erlang’s popularity will only go up from here.