T5: Erlang Web frameworks

Abstract

Erlang started life nearly thirty years ago as part of an effort to find more effective ways of developing highly concurrent, highly reliable telecommunications systems. Fortunately, we've found that its concurrency and reliability capabilities are just as valuable in other domains as well, especially web development. This tutorial will explore several Erlang web servers, including Yaws and Mochiweb, and will examine the Nitrogen, Webmachine, and Chicago Boss Erlang web frameworks. Each web server and framework provides different features and capabilities, allowing them to address different portions of the vast web development landscape.

Attendees should possess a basic knowledge of HTTP, HTML, and JSON. Some prior knowledge of Erlang is preferred but not required, as the tutorial also includes an overview of Erlang. Participants will gain deeper knowledge of the basics of Erlang web development, will learn how to use specific features of different Erlang web servers and frameworks, and acquire a better understanding of which servers and frameworks to apply to different kinds of web development problems.

Preparations

The examples in this tutorial are designed for a UNIX-style system, so if possible please bring a system running Linux, OS X, or some other UNIX variant. Users of non-UNIX systems are welcome to attend the tutorial, of course, but running the tutorial examples on those systems will likely be difficult.

In addition, please ensure your system has the following:

1. Please install Erlang, preferably version R16B01 which you can retrieve from this page.

Binary installations from the above link are easiest, but you can choose to install from source instead if you wish. Either way, please make sure Erlang is installed such that it's available in your PATH. Please do not install Erlang from typical OS-specific repositories as their versions tend to be out of date and incorrectly built.

1. Please download the tarball of tutorial examples from here and unpack it somewhere on your system.

2. Please ensure you have the "make" development tool on your system.

3. You will also need the curl and netcat tools on your system. For example, OS X comes with these preinstalled in /usr/bin/curl and /usr/bin/nc respectively. Linux installations tend to have them as already installed as well, but if not, they're common and easy to find.

Steve Vinoski

Steve Vinoski is an architect at Basho Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA. He's been a committer on the Yaws web server project since

1. Steve has been writing "The Functional Web" column, in which he explores the application of functional programming languages and techniques to web development, for the IEEE Internet Computing magazine since 2009. He's also written several other articles about REST and HTTP over the past decade.