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-::: Erlang and the Web
-
-:: The Web is concurrent
-
-When you access a website there is little concurrency
-involved. A few connections are opened and requests
-are sent through these connections. Then the web page
-is displayed on your screen. Your browser will only
-open up to 4 or 8 connections to the server, depending
-on your settings. This isn't much.
-
-But think about it. You are not the only one accessing
-the server at the same time. There can be hundreds, if
-not thousands, if not millions of connections to the
-same server at the same time.
-
-Even today a lot of systems used in production haven't
-solved the C10K problem (ten thousand concurrent connections).
-And the ones who did are trying hard to get to the next
-step, C100K, and are pretty far from it.
-
-Erlang meanwhile has no problem handling millions of
-connections. At the time of writing there are application
-servers written in Erlang that can handle more than two
-million connections on a single server in a real production
-application, with spare memory and CPU!
-
-The Web is concurrent, and Erlang is a language designed
-for concurrency, so it is a perfect match.
-
-Of course, various platforms need to scale beyond a few
-million connections. This is where Erlang's built-in
-distribution mechanisms come in. If one server isn't
-enough, add more! Erlang allows you to use the same code
-for talking to local processes or to processes in other
-parts of your cluster, which means you can scale very
-quickly if the need arises.
-
-The Web has large userbases, and the Erlang platform was
-designed to work in a distributed setting, so it is a
-perfect match.
-
-Or is it? Surely you can find solutions to handle that many
-concurrent connections with your favorite language... But all
-these solutions will break down in the next few years. Why?
-Firstly because servers don't get any more powerful, they
-instead get a lot more cores and memory. This is only useful
-if your application can use them properly, and Erlang is
-light-years away from anything else in that area. Secondly,
-today your computer and your phone are online, tomorrow your
-watch, goggles, bike, car, fridge and tons of other devices
-will also connect to various applications on the Internet.
-
-Only Erlang is prepared to deal with what's coming.
-
-:: The Web is soft real time
-
-What does soft real time mean, you ask? It means we want the
-operations done as quickly as possible, and in the case of
-web applications, it means we want the data propagated fast.
-
-In comparison, hard real time has a similar meaning, but also
-has a hard time constraint, for example an operation needs to
-be done in under N milliseconds otherwise the system fails
-entirely.
-
-Users aren't that needy yet, they just want to get access
-to their content in a reasonable delay, and they want the
-actions they make to register at most a few seconds after
-they submitted them, otherwise they'll start worrying about
-whether it successfully went through.
-
-The Web is soft real time because taking longer to perform an
-operation would be seen as bad quality of service.
-
-Erlang is a soft real time system. It will always run
-processes fairly, a little at a time, switching to another
-process after a while and preventing a single process to
-steal resources from all others. This means that Erlang
-can guarantee stable low latency of operations.
-
-Erlang provides the guarantees that the soft real time Web
-requires.
-
-:: The Web is asynchronous
-
-Long ago, the Web was synchronous because HTTP was synchronous.
-You fired a request, and then waited for a response. Not anymore.
-It all began when XmlHttpRequest started being used. It allowed
-the client to perform asynchronous calls to the server.
-
-Then Websocket appeared and allowed both the server and the client
-to send data to the other endpoint completely asynchronously. The
-data is contained within frames and no response is necessary.
-
-Erlang processes work the same. They send each other data contained
-within messages and then continue running without needing a response.
-They tend to spend most of their time inactive, waiting for a new
-message, and the Erlang VM happily activate them when one is received.
-
-It is therefore quite easy to imagine Erlang being good at receiving
-Websocket frames, which may come in at unpredictable times, pass the
-data to the responsible processes which are always ready waiting for
-new messages, and perform the operations required by only activating
-the required parts of the system.
-
-The more recent Web technologies, like Websocket of course, but also
-SPDY and HTTP/2.0, are all fully asynchronous protocols. The concept
-of requests and responses is retained of course, but anything could
-be sent in between, by both the client or the browser, and the
-responses could also be received in a completely different order.
-
-Erlang is by nature asynchronous and really good at it thanks to the
-great engineering that has been done in the VM over the years. It's
-only natural that it's so good at dealing with the asynchronous Web.
-
-:: The Web is omnipresent
-
-The Web has taken a very important part of our lives. We're
-connected at all times, when we're on our phone, using our computer,
-passing time using a tablet while in the bathroom... And this
-isn't going to slow down, every single device at home or on us
-will be connected.
-
-All these devices are always connected. And with the number of
-alternatives to give you access to the content you seek, users
-tend to not stick around when problems arise. Users today want
-their applications to be always available and if it's having
-too many issues they just move on.
-
-Despite this, when developers choose a product to use for building
-web applications, their only concern seem to be "Is it fast?",
-and they look around for synthetic benchmarks showing which one
-is the fastest at sending "Hello world" with only a handful
-concurrent connections. Web benchmarks haven't been representative
-of reality in a long time, and are drifting further away as
-time goes on.
-
-What developers should really ask themselves is "Can I service
-all my users with no interruption?" and they'd find that they have
-two choices. They can either hope for the best, or they can use
-Erlang.
-
-Erlang is built for fault tolerance. When writing code in any other
-language, you have to check all the return values and act accordingly
-to avoid any unforeseen issues. If you're lucky, you won't miss
-anything important. When writing Erlang code, you can just check
-the success condition and ignore all errors. If an error happen,
-the Erlang process crashes and is then restarted by a special
-process called a supervisor.
-
-The Erlang developer thus has no need to fear about unhandled
-errors, and can focus on handling only the errors that should
-give some feedback to the user and let the system take care of
-the rest. This also has the advantage of allowing him to write
-a lot less code, and letting him sleep at night.
-
-Erlang's fault tolerance oriented design is the first piece of
-what makes it the best choice for the omnipresent, always available
-Web.
-
-The second piece is Erlang's built-in distribution. Distribution
-is a key part of building a fault tolerant system, because it
-allows you to handle bigger failures, like a whole server going
-down, or even a data center entirely.
-
-Fault tolerance and distribution are important today, and will be
-vital in the future of the Web. Erlang is ready.
-
-:: Erlang is the ideal platform for the Web
-
-Erlang provides all the important features that the Web requires
-or will require in the near future. Erlang is a perfect match
-for the Web, and it only makes sense to use it to build web
-applications.