Comments on: Video Tutorial To Start Developing Web Applications on Erlang

By: How To Quickly Set Up Ubuntu 8.04 loaded with Erlang, Mochiweb and Nginx | BeeBuzz

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:22:43 +0000

[...] UPDATE, Octobre 20th 2008: Read and view more about installing Mochiweb and creating a first Erlang Web application on our video [...]

By: Pavel

Pavel — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:11:28 +0000

Thank you very much. The demo project is a great start point to build my own app.

By: Hughes

Hughes — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:03:45 +0000

@Tim

Thanks for sharing. Just as a side note, we didn’t choose to go Restful because we wanted a clear separation between our client side/view stack and the business logic.

@Justin

Really interesting article. I like the lightweight approach you have taken.

My tutorial is definitively not full-fledged app minded as I wanted it as close to the mochiweb metal as possible

Having said that, we are addressing some of the details you mentioned in your post but using a home made layer since we are not building a http general purpose application.

We are actually tunneling all of the ‘Jsons’ trough both the GET(jsonp) and the POST method and we are using a unique interface to handle them (the exceptions are few).
Keep up the good work.

By: Nicolas O

Nicolas O — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:55:34 +0000

This tutorial is clear and complete. The online documentation about web servers in Erlang is desperately poor, but here is all the useful info to get started.

Looking forward for more info on your server-side work. Nice that you keep it open.

By: Justin Sheehy

Justin Sheehy — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:19:57 +0000

Hughes,

This is a really neat video, thanks for making it. It seems like an excellent way to get people quickly excited about making Web applications atop mochiweb.

In order to help me figure out if some of my own assumptions were correct, I lifted your tutorial application up on top of the Webmachine layer. I posted about that experience here:

http://blog.therestfulway.com/2008/10/beebole-erlangweb-tutorial-webmachine.html

Cheers!

By: Tim Dysinger

Tim Dysinger — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:32:01 +0000

I did a similar demo app with rails talking to mochiweb.
http://github.com/dysinger/mochirest/tree/master
http://dysinger.net/2008/10/09/mochirest-rails-ui-and-erlangmochiweb-rest-json-service/

Mine is not as cool as yours though. I didn’t use mnesia and I don’t have a drag and drop UI.

Cool tip from Bob above. I used erlang record.

By: Hughes

Hughes — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:09:05 +0000

@Bob Ippolito

Thank you very much. That’s certainly the kind of feedback I was waiting for ; ) Your small example brings a good point and I’ll test implementing this module that way. I really appreciate it.

@madlep, JT Archie

Thanks both for your positive comments

By: JT Archie

JT Archie — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:09:16 +0000

Brilliant! I have been waiting for something like this for awhile. Thanks.

By: Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:37:49 +0000

Given that the structure of the JSON return values is {struct, X} you can actually make your struct module a parameterized module with a Proplist parameter, and call things in-place like the Request “object” in mochiweb. This would probably break if they optimize parameterized instances but it works fine now

Here’s a minimal example:

-module(struct, [Proplist]).
-export([lookup/1, to_proplist/0]).

key(Key) when is_binary(Key) ->
Key;
key(Key) when is_atom(Key) ->
list_to_binary((atom_to_list(Key)));
key(Key) when is_list(Key) ->
list_to_binary(Key).

lookup(Key) ->
case proplists:lookup(key(Key), to_proplist()) of
none ->
none;
{_K, Value} ->
{Key, Value}
end.

to_proplist() ->
Proplist.

By: madlep

madlep — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:24:53 +0000

Wow, excellent video.

I’ve been playing around with Mochiweb a bit lately, but never gotten far past the “hello world” level with it. This really shows off how to get up and running