Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang

The Erlang programming language, together with its Open Telecom Platform (OTP) framework, is renowned for its exceptional concurrency and fault-tolerance capabilities. Developers are often initially attracted to Erlang just so they can try out these features, and experienced Erlang server application developers make heavy use of these and other Erlang traits. Successful Erlang server applications often must be Web-accessible, even if not initially designed that way, which means developers must integrate such services into the world of HTTP. Fortunately, building a Web application in Erlang isn´t necessarily difficult; it mostly requires a change in thinking. For a small investment in learning, your Web application can take advantage of all the exceptional features Erlang provides to non-Web applications: scalability, fault tolerance, concurrency, relatively painless distributed system capabilities, and live system upgrades. The growing interest in applying Erlang/OTP to Web services and Web applications is driving the development of several interesting open source projects. In this column, we´ll look at some of the more popular Erlang Web frameworks and Web servers.