Articles

Cowboy 2.4

02 May

Cowboy 2.4.0 has been released! Numerous HTTP/2 options have been added to control the HTTP/2 SETTINGS and general behavior of HTTP/2 connections. The options for initial window sizes, maximum frame sizes or compression table sizes might be of interest for optimizing the performance of HTTP/2 connections. Experimental support for Websocket over HTTP/2 was added. Note that browsers do not currently support it. The only browser with partial support is Google Chrome 67 (dev build) started with a specific flag.

Cowboy 2.3

04 Apr

Cowboy 2.3.0 has been released! This release focused on adding support for the functions from the sys module for introspecting Cowboy processes. Many bugs have also been fixed. A more complete list of changes can be found in the migration guide: Migrating from Cowboy 2.2 to 2.3. You can donate to this project via BountySource because I need to eat snacks when I write code. Thanks in advance!

Cowboy 2.2

13 Dec

Cowboy 2.2.0 has been released! This release focused on adding features required for writing gRPC servers and on completing test suites for the core HTTP RFCs. The cowboy_req:stream_trailers/2 function has been added. It terminates the streamed response by adding some trailer field values. This feature is required for gRPC. The max_skip_body_length option was added. It controls how much of the request body we are willing to skip to get to the next request for HTTP/1.

Cowboy 2.1

09 Nov

Cowboy 2.1.0 has been released! This release focused on adding features that were temporarily removed during the 2.0 release process: The client TLS certificate can now be obtained. The 100 Continue response is now sent automatically again when necessary. NEW: It is now possible to send informational responses (1XX) directly from user code via the cowboy_req:inform/2,3 functions. NEW: cowboy_rest handlers can now switch to any other type of handler from almost any callback.

Cowboy 2.0

04 Oct

Cowboy 2.0.0 has been released! This is the new stable version of Cowboy. There are no new releases planned for the 1.x version of Cowboy. The highlights from the release are: HTTP/2 support! Websocket compression! Much simpler, cleaner interface. No more weird errors just because you discard the Req object. A new low-level interface that receives all events from every set of request and response.

Cowboy 2.0 release candidate 2

23 Aug

Cowboy 2.0.0-rc.2 has been released! This is the new recommended version of Cowboy. Its API should not change before release. While you probably should not use it in production yet, many do successfully. Use at your own risk. This new version contains fixes for the following issues: HTTP/2 server push was using the wrong header compression context. HTTP/2 flow control could end up queueing data in the wrong order when resuming the sending of data.

Cowboy 2.0 release candidate 1

24 Jul

Cowboy 2.0.0-rc.1 has been released! This is the new recommended version of Cowboy. Its API should not change before release. While you probably should not use it in production yet, many do successfully. Use at your own risk. The plan is to have a new RC version every couple weeks until the summer ends or later if there are still blocking issues open. Only issues that can’t be fixed without making breaking changes to the interface may block the release.

The elephant in the room

26 Mar

Have you ever tried telling someone why they should use Erlang? You boast the smaller code size, the auto healing mechanisms, the distribution and they seem really excited. They wonder why they never heard about Erlang before. And then you show them what the code looks like. All excitement goes away. The smiles disappear. Their face starts becoming really serious. You lost them. You know you lost them. They comment on the syntax, or perhaps you do, already admitting defeat.

Don't let it crash

22 Jan

We have a specific mindset when writing Erlang programs. We focus on the normal execution of the program and don’t handle most of the errors that may occur. We sometimes call this normal execution the happy path. The general pattern behind writing only for the happy path, letting the VM catch errors (writing them to a log for future consumption) and then having a supervisor restart the processes that failed from a clean state, has a name.

Cowboy 2.0 pre-release 4

03 Jan

Cowboy 2.0.0-pre.4 has been released! This is the new recommended version of Cowboy. While I would not recommend putting it in production just yet, I do recommend you start writing new applications with this Cowboy version. The most significant changes in the pre-release are: A new architecture: there now is one process per connection and one process per request. This was done because HTTP/2 allows running requests concurrently.

Ranch 1.3

28 Nov

Ranch 1.3.0 has been released! This release fixes a number of long standing issues and adds a small number of features: The ssl application has been added to the list of dependencies. If you don’t need it, you can remove it automatically when fetching Ranch or when building the release. If you do need it, you will no longer have issues shutting down a node because of Ranch.

Mailing list archived

29 Aug

The old mailing list archives have been added to the site, mainly for referencing purposes. The mailing list has been shut down and all personal information has been deleted. If you need help with a project, consider either opening a ticket on that project’s issues tracker or going through the community channels (erlang-questions, #ninenines or #erlang on Freenode). Prefer tickets; often when people have issues it highlights an underlying problem in the project or its documentation.

Website update

02 Apr

Last week-end I updated the Nine Nines website. I switched to Hugo. The site is now built from Asciidoc documents. You probably saw me switch to Asciidoc for documentation this past year. This is the natural conclusion to that story. The great thing is that with a little bit of Makefile magic I can just copy the documentation files into Hugo and poof, they appear on the website. I am very happy with that new setup.

The Erlanger Playbook September 2015 Update

02 Sep

An update to The Erlanger Playbook is now available! The Erlanger Playbook is a book about software development using Erlang. It currently covers all areas from the conception, design, the writing of code, documentation and tests. The book is still a work in progress. Future topics will include refactoring, debugging and tracing, benchmarking, releases, community management (for open source projects). This update fixes a number of things and adds two chapters: IOlists and Erlang building blocks.

The Erlanger Playbook

18 Jun

I am proud to announce the pre-release of The Erlanger Playbook. The Erlanger Playbook is a book about software development using Erlang. It currently covers all areas from the conception, design, the writing of code, documentation and tests. The book is still a work in progress. Future topics will include refactoring, debugging and tracing, benchmarking, releases, community management (for open source projects). The following sections are currently available:

Validating UTF-8 binaries with Erlang

06 Mar

Yesterday I pushed Websocket permessage-deflate to Cowboy master. I also pushed a change in the way the code validates UTF-8 data (required for text and close frames as per the spec). When looking into why the permessage-deflate tests in autobahntestsuite were taking such a long time, I found that autobahn is using an adaptation of the algorithm named Flexible and Economical UTF-8 Decoder. This is the C99 implementation: // Copyright (c) 2008-2009 Bjoern Hoehrmann <bjoern@hoehrmann.

On open source

05 Sep

Last week I read a great article on contributing to open source by Alvaro Videla. He makes many great points and I am in agreement with most of it. This made me want to properly explain my point of view with regard to open source and contributions. Unlike most open source evangelism articles I will not talk about ideals or any of that crap, but rather my personal feelings and experience.

The story so far

23 Aug

As I am away from home with little to do (some call this a vacation) I wanted to reflect a little on the story so far, or how I arrived to Erlang and got to where I am now. The raw personal experience. It’ll be an article that’s more about social aspect, communities and marketing a project than technical considerations. As a period piece, it will also allow me to reflect on the evolution of Erlang in recent years.

Cowboy 2.0 and query strings

20 Aug

Now that Cowboy 1.0 is out, I can spend some of my time thinking about Cowboy 2.0 that will be released soon after Erlang/OTP 18.0. This entry discusses the proposed changes to query string handling in Cowboy. Cowboy 2.0 will respond to user wishes by simplifying the interface of the cowboy_req module. Users want two things: less juggling with the Req variable, and more maps. Maps is the only dynamic key/value data structure in Erlang that we can match directly to extract values, allowing users to greatly simplify their code as they don’t need to call functions to do everything anymore.

January 2014 status

07 Jan

I will now be regularly writing posts about project status, plans and hopes for the future. Before that though, there’s one important news to share. Until a year ago all development was financed through consulting and development services. This worked alright but too much time was spent doing things that didn’t benefit the open source projects. And that didn’t make me happy at all. Because I like being happy I stopped that for the most part and spent the year figuring things out, experimenting and discussing with people about it.