Sunday, March 23, 2008

I Play WoW: A Cool Facebook App Built With ErlyWeb

Nick Gerakines, the Author of Facebook Application Development, created with ErlyWeb the very cool Facebook app I Play WoW. I Play WoW bridges between real people and the characters they play on World of Warcraft. Nick told me he got a lot of feedback such as "Wow! I didn't know my brother-in-law is in my guild!" and "Its been 5 years since I talked to some of them, but a bunch of my friends from school play on these realms and I didn't even know they played".

Some facts:
- 53.5k installs
- 2.9k daily active users
- 1.3k application fans
- 200+ new users a day on average
- In the past 30 days its gotten over 2 million page views where users spend more than 5 minutes on average on the application
- Erlang application layout:
* Charstore w/ Mnesia: Acts as the raw character store and cache for interactions between wowarmory.com
* I Play WoW w/ ErlyWeb + Mnesia: The front-end and ui for the application. The majority of the FB API calls are made here or are spawned from here.
* There is still one component in perl that is yet to be ported over, mainly due to not having enough time. Its on the list of things to do.

(My note: it sounds like Nick is also using spawned processes to make FB API calls asynchronously. It's a great technique for reducing page load time and avoiding the annoying timeouts Facebook imposes on page renderings.)

If you play World of Warcraft (an addiction I've luckily been able to avoid this far :) ) and you are on Facebook, give I Play WoW a try. You may discover that your boss is a level 10 ogre or something :)

Congrats, Nick, for creating such a successful app with ErlyWeb!

3 comments:

Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt said...

ErlyWeb is slowly taking off :)

Jonathan said...

Cool.

I have been trying to learn Erlang for a while but have been stuck in the command prompt part of it during my learning.
Maybe this will help encourage me to learn it much more seriously.

Very good work, Yariv.

Laurian Gridinoc said...

ErlyWeb + Mnesia? how, I thought ErlyWeb works with MySQL only. I would give it a try with Mnesia :)