diff options
| author | Loïc Hoguin <[email protected]> | 2016-03-28 15:36:42 +0200 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Loïc Hoguin <[email protected]> | 2016-03-28 15:36:42 +0200 |
| commit | fe3492a98de29942477b061cd02c92246f4bf85a (patch) | |
| tree | 2255b796a657e6e4dfb72beec1141258d17f1220 /docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web | |
| download | ninenines.eu-fe3492a98de29942477b061cd02c92246f4bf85a.tar.gz ninenines.eu-fe3492a98de29942477b061cd02c92246f4bf85a.tar.bz2 ninenines.eu-fe3492a98de29942477b061cd02c92246f4bf85a.zip | |
Initial commit, new website system
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web/index.html | 300 |
1 files changed, 300 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web/index.html b/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8206392a --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/erlang_web/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,300 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> + +<head> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> + <meta name="description" content=""> + <meta name="author" content="Loïc Hoguin based on a design from (Soft10) Pol Cámara"> + + <meta name="generator" content="Hugo 0.15" /> + + <title>Nine Nines: Erlang and the Web</title> + + <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,700,400italic' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + + <link href="/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> + <link href="/css/99s.css" rel="stylesheet"> + + <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/img/ico/favicon.ico"> + <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-114.png"> + <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-72.png"> + <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-57.png"> + + +</head> + + +<body class=""> + <header id="page-head"> + <div id="topbar" class="container"> + <div class="row"> + <div class="span2"> + <h1 id="logo"><a href="/" title="99s">99s</a></h1> + </div> + <div class="span10"> + + <div id="side-header"> + <nav> + <ul> + <li><a title="Hear my thoughts" href="/articles">Articles</a></li> + <li><a title="Watch my talks" href="/talks">Talks</a></li> + <li class="active"><a title="Read the docs" href="/docs">Documentation</a></li> + <li><a title="Request my services" href="/services">Consulting & Training</a></li> + </ul> + </nav> + <ul id="social"> + <li> + <a href="https://github.com/ninenines" title="Check my Github repositories"><img src="/img/ico_github.png" data-hover="/img/ico_github_alt.png" alt="Github"></a> + </li> + <li> + <a title="Keep in touch!" href="http://twitter.com/lhoguin"><img src="/img/ico_microblog.png" data-hover="/img/ico_microblog_alt.png"></a> + </li> + <li> + <a title="Contact me" href="mailto:[email protected]"><img src="/img/ico_mail.png" data-hover="/img/ico_mail_alt.png"></a> + </li> + </ul> + </div> + </div> + </div> + </div> + + +</header> + +<div id="contents" class="two_col"> +<div class="container"> +<div class="row"> +<div id="docs" class="span9 maincol"> + +<h1 class="lined-header"><span>Erlang and the Web</span></h1> + +<div class="sect1">
+<h2 id="_the_web_is_concurrent">The Web is concurrent</h2>
+<div class="sectionbody">
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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!</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>The Web is concurrent, and Erlang is a language designed
+for concurrency, so it is a perfect match.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>The Web has large userbases, and the Erlang platform was
+designed to work in a distributed setting, so it is a
+perfect match.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>Only Erlang is prepared to deal with what’s coming.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="sect1">
+<h2 id="_the_web_is_soft_real_time">The Web is soft real time</h2>
+<div class="sectionbody">
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>The Web is soft real time because taking longer to perform an
+operation would be seen as bad quality of service.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>Erlang provides the guarantees that the soft real time Web
+requires.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="sect1">
+<h2 id="_the_web_is_asynchronous">The Web is asynchronous</h2>
+<div class="sectionbody">
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>The more recent Web technologies, like Websocket of course, but also
+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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="sect1">
+<h2 id="_the_web_is_omnipresent">The Web is omnipresent</h2>
+<div class="sectionbody">
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>Erlang’s fault tolerance oriented design is the first piece of
+what makes it the best choice for the omnipresent, always available
+Web.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+<div class="paragraph"><p>Fault tolerance and distribution are important today, and will be
+vital in the future of the Web. Erlang is ready.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="sect1">
+<h2 id="_erlang_is_the_ideal_platform_for_the_web">Erlang is the ideal platform for the Web</h2>
+<div class="sectionbody">
+<div class="paragraph"><p>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.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+ + + +</div> + +<div class="span3 sidecol"> + + +<h3> + Cowboy + 2.0 + + User Guide +</h3> + +<ul> + + <li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide">User Guide</a></li> + + + <li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/manual">Function Reference</a></li> + + +</ul> + +<h4 id="docs-nav">Navigation</h4> + +<h4>Version select</h4> +<ul> + + + + <li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/1.0/guide">1.0</a></li> + + <li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide">2.0</a></li> + +</ul> + +</div> +</div> +</div> +</div> + + <footer> + <div class="container"> + <div class="row"> + <div class="span6"> + <p id="scroll-top"><a href="#">↑ Scroll to top</a></p> + <nav> + <ul> + <li><a href="mailto:[email protected]" title="Contact us">Contact us</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/ninenines/ninenines.github.io" title="Github repository">Contribute to this site</a></li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + <div class="span6 credits"> + <p><img src="/img/footer_logo.png"></p> + <p>Copyright © Loïc Hoguin 2012-2016</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> + </footer> + + + <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script> + <script src="/js/bootstrap-carousel.js"></script> + <script src="/js/bootstrap-dropdown.js"></script> + <script src="/js/custom.js"></script> + </body> +</html> + + |