In times where the net ist getting faster and speed as well as user interaction is getting more and more important people try to get functions running which used to be a domain of desktop applications. Therefore I had today a look on Erlang researching for the best viable solution for a California-based customer.

Here is my quotation from the letter I send him:

Dear, after spending lot’s of hours reading about paradigms and experiences with Erlang I found the following quotation which describes significantly the position, where Erlang resides:

„Any sufficiently advanced concurrent C program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang“

Erlang is way closer to the machines roots then Python is and eliminates such things as concurrent locks (deadlocks). So the conclusion of the research is that I recommend heavily using Erlang instead some Python derivatives. Furthermore Erlang is much better in scaling and has one of the best reliability statistics in the server market.
Furthermore is Mnesia (the native Erlang database) adjusted to this programming language and resides completely in the memory allowing extremely fast data access.
Based on our experience and the extensive research we did in the last days I would like to recommend a system (e.g. used too by SlideAware) where the main web application is developed in Django and the …. are managed and coordinated by the custom Erlang server engine. Furthermore we recommend implementing EUnit which is the Erlang UnitTest Framework.
Regarding Erlang we discovered that there are a lot of very good developers out there and Erlang is especially in web application environments catching up. Some people even refer it as a hype. So it seems like that Erlang will be a big issue in web application development in the next years.

So to me Erlang looks pretty much promising. Especially when thinking about future applications for the web I do have the feeling, that Erlang has the potential to become very very important for managing highly interactive user driven web applications.

[Update]: read this introduction.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Performance Tuning, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.