Thursday, March 01, 2007

Announcing ErlyWeb 0.5

I'm pleased to announce that ErlyWeb 0.5, the biggest and best release yet, is now available to download from erlyweb.org. There's a long list of improvements and fixes, of which you can read here.

As I indicated in a previous posting, ErlyWeb no longer supports app views. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you should convert your app view to an html container and use the 'phased' return value from the app controller, as described in the updated documentation on the website.

ErlyWeb is still in alpha, and will likely remain this way until somebody has used it to build a complete production app. So, who will reach the finish line first? :)

19 comments:

Chris Hartjes said...

Hey Yariv, I was wondering about your thoughts on "Comet" apps done in Erlang with Erlyweb. Anything you can share or any linkage to suggest. I keep coming back to your blog to see what's going on because I keep thinking I'm missing something by ignoring Erlang. Although it's not easy to find hosting, I still want to try something out...

ChrisB said...

Is there a shared-hosting solution available for Erlang/ErlyWeb?

Yariv said...

There's no shared hosting solution for Erlang (this would be complicated to set up safely, although ErlHive may make it possible). The best choice is to rent a VPS (cheap) or a dedicated server (more expensive). Regarding Comet -- Erlang is by far the best language I know for building the backends for Comet apps -- and I think I'm familiar with pretty much all the relevant ones. However, it's difficult to say "this is how you do Comet" because Comet is a very broad category and within it there are many types of apps one could build using a variety of technical solutions.

ChrisB said...

Many thanks for the quick reply. I'll get to grips with ErlyWeb first and then work out how to cross the hosting bridge when I get there :)

Chris Hartjes said...

@Yariv, could you point me at a few examples of comet apps built with Erlang? I do know about Meebo but would love to see some examples of others.

Yariv said...

I actually don't know of any besides Meebo (which uses ejabberd in the backend). In fact, I only know of 3 applications that use Comet: Meebo, GTalk in Gmail, and Digg Spy. I have no idea what languages the latter 2 are written in.

Can Barixcan said...

I am very interested in Erlang, I want to start learning it... Do you think it would be a good idea to start developing a comet app using OpenLaszlo which requests XML data from the server? How good would it be to use Erlyweb as the server backend framework? I really like Erlang but I am wondering because I am new to it the app I develop will not end up to make use of all the good features... what do you think?

Yariv said...

I think you should first worry about defining the app and what its functionality is and then about what technologies to use. Only after you've spec'd your app, you should compare the different technologies and decide which one is most suitable for building it. I think that ErlyWeb is a great backend solution for many webapps because it gives you many of the producitivity benefits of other frameworks without _preventing_ you from adding Comet features if you need them. However, it's possible that your app requires some features or libraries that are easier to implement in other languages, in which case ErlyWeb may not be the best choice. In the end, programming languages are means, not ends :)

Vesa Kaihlavirta said...

What sort of work is needed for erlyweb to fit nicely with Mnesia? Would you think it to be worth it?

Patrick said...

I had been previously toying with erlang, now with RoR and i have decided!

ErlyWeb is THE way to go! :)

Although it's bad that it has not got some off the shelf stuff (forum, blog....) :(

I am on string with time and want to push first pre-alpha before the end of this month! :)) Now the problem is that i will have to use RoR forum and blog software and ErlyWeb software :)

How do i integrate in erlyweb the auto-response system for user signup system? Any tools that are in use for yaws?

BTW can't stop to say TWO TUMBS UP!! (^_^)

Yariv said...

Regarding Mnesia, the next version of ErlyWeb will have a Mnesia driver for ErlyDB, letting you access Mnesia in the same fashion as other DBMS's. For now, you can use Mnesia directly. I think Mnesia works great as an in-memory cache for persistent data.

Partick, thanks for the enthusiastic feedback :) The off the shelf components don't exist yet but implementing them on a basic level shouldn't be that hard and would also make a good learning exercise.

A friend said...

Sorry dude but your framework is never going to make it if you don't provide clear instructions on how to install it. Start from the basics and move step by step.

"Get erlang", "get yaws" is not going to cut it. Tell me step by step what I need to install for erlang and how, same for yaws. "Copy ebins" is not an instruction... What's the erlang shell? (Is it elr, erlc, or something else?) I've spent countless hours on this shit and I couldn't get it to work. Please please provide a guide step by step for those who are not Erlang programmers.

Yariv said...

Friend, thanks for bringing this issue to my attention. I will write an article focussing on how to get started with ErlyWeb assuming the reader is new to Erlang. I didn't know it could be so painful.

A friend said...

Thank you Yariv. And I'm sorry if I came across as an asshole. I just was very stressed after hours of attempts to get Erlang, Yaws and Erlyweb installed on Ubuntu. Thank you for your work and for what it is a terrific framework.

David Bergman said...

Yariv, have you had any problems with ErlyWeb and Erlang R11B-3? I have encountered some weird problems with ejabberd and that version and hope that ErlyWeb is not as picky :-)

Yariv said...

nope, I haven't seen any problems :)

Can Barixcan said...

Hi all, Ubuntu Edgy still has a bad erlang package, it has issues that will make thinks look like they work but they won't (dynamic binding issues caused during compilation ). Use Fiesty or Dapper for ubuntu.

Can Barixcan said...

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/68500
this is where the bug is , still not assigned to anyone...

Aidan said...

This may be a silly question as I'm not overly familiar with yaws but does anyone know how I can get yaws to pull in the new compiled code after I make a change.

At the moment I'm making a change to a template file, calling erlyweb:compile and then killing the yaws process and restarting it completely (calling yaws:restart() doesn't seem to have any effect).

I'm guessing there's a much better way to do this... suggestions?