Garrett Smith
Building a web app in Erlang - yes you heard me right I said Erlang not Elixir

Discussion: Issue #175

“Erlang is not good for building web applications.” You’ve heard that right? Because Erlang is terrible for string processing. It doesn’t have Ruby on Rails. It has Phoenix. Well, Elixir has Phoenix. Erlang is only good for telco switches. Maybe a distributed key value store. When it comes to Web apps - use Ruby, or if you’re going to deploy your application, use Elixir.

In this talk, Garrett will build a web app in Erlang, not Elixir. He’ll show that unmodified plain old Erlang not only can be used for web application development, it’s great. Really great. You’ll switch. You’ll tell your friends and they’ll switch.

This talk is inspired by a presentation that Ian Bicking gave years ago entited “Building a Web Framework from Scratch”. The idea is that web apps can be built without monolithic frameworks, starting with nothing and gradually adding functionality using abstractions that closely mirror the Web’s underlying protocols. While the content is Erlang, the lessons for web application development apply generally.

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