Thursday, March 15, 2007

Boston BarCamp2

Is anybody who reads this blog going?

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBoston2

I think I may go and try to talk some people into using Erlang in their startups.

Update (2 hours later):

It looks like my job is going to be easier than expected. I checked out the at the BarCamp real time visual aggregator (http://barcamp.org/BarCampNewsVisualAggregator), and guess what I saw?


TECH. PROBLEMS

This experiment may cause to much traffic for pbwiki... to be improved...


Maybe yaws could be a better platform for serving the BarCamp aggregator: http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html :)

7 comments:

Topher Cyll said...

I'll be there. From Shimon's email it sounds like it'll be about 200 people, which is completely awesome.

Leo said...

Hi Yariv!

I have just enjoyed coding in Erlang. Erlang/Ejabber is new for me.

There is the following error while I compile a erl file, I don't understand (Ex: tut is a tut.erl file):

(ejabberd@localhost)1> c(tut).
./tut.erl:none: internal error in parse_module;
crash reason: {undef,[{epp,parse_file,["./tut.erl",[".","."],[]]},
{compile,parse_module,1},
{compile,'-internal_comp/4-anonymous-1-',2},
{compile,fold_comp,3},
{compile,internal_comp,4},
{compile,internal,3}]}
error

The content of tut.erl:

-module(tut).
-export([double/1]).

double(X) ->
2 * X.

Could you tell me why?
Thanks!

Leo said...

PS:

tut.erl is in the same directory where I started erl.exe: C:/Program Files/ejabberd-1.1.3/bin

Vijay Chakravarthy said...

Hi Yariv,
We just launched our product today. The backend went through a number of iterations, being first written in Python, then Ruby on Rails (for rapid prototyping), and then in erlang.
So you can officially consider us a startup using erlang :)
Vijay

joshua noble said...

I wish I'd gone, but I had to teach that day. I'm glad to find that there are other people into Erlang in Boston. Of course, from the looks of this blog you really know what you're doing, whereas I just started reading the book.

New User said...

Yariv, I think your wonderful work is being wasted because there is still no coherent way of installing erlyweb. How exactly do you expect people to try out your software when the install portion consists of 3 lines in the original erlyweb tutorial?

Right now, as you predicted, people are turning from Rails as a production-ready framework, and looking for more mature technologies like Erlang. Erlyweb is the only game in town when it comes to an alternative.

Please don't sqander this opportunity by focusing too much on the internals of the framework and too little on a way to get people quickly and painlessly started on it.

All the wonderful niceties in the framwork aren't worth a sneeze if people get frustrated while trying to install it, and go look elsewhere. I am afraid you are losing people on the "install" part.

This is a desperate plea because I don't want Django's fate to befall you. I think a concise and coherent list of things to do in terms of installing ErlyWeb/Yaws/Erlang would be very helpful and much appreciated! Comments like "install yaws if you don't have it already" are discouraging. Erlang and its various modules have very specific requirements and installing it is not as easy as it may seem to a seasoned Erlang developer.

Why would someone trying to try out your framework have yaws already? Chances are most people don't and let's not make things difficult for the few who do decide to give this a shot based on RoR's dismal performance vis-a-viz scaling etc.

Ruby on rails got where it is today, not only because of its internals but the way the install was made to be a breeze. At the very least you should consider writing a text file which will allow users to install erlyweb with all its requisites without having to waste a day googling for it.

I'm sorry if my tone offends you, but if you want to play, then you have to make it easy for people to install it and play with it so they can help you in the process. Otherwise, ErlyWeb and all the work done will be a waste. Please don't point us to erlyweb.org because right now it is just a circular loop back to your blog back to erlyweb.org.

what we need is an erlyweb install howto, and no assumptions on what someone new to erlang/yaws/erlyweb might already know.
This should come with the erlyweb install bundle so people can go and get the rest of the pieces.

Thanks so much for reading this. You can delete this comment if you like, it is mainly intended for you as you are the main developer.

cheers.

Yariv said...

New user,

I appreciate the positive criticism. I agree 100% that ErlyWeb must be very easy to install. My focus now is the make it installable view CEAN, and also to write better installation instructions. This situation will be fixed soon.