N2O: Fastest Web Framework for Erlang over WebSockets

[Maxim Sokhatsky]

Greetings, Jesse and Community!

We at Synrc Research Center want to present a new fork from Nitrogen. 

We've been used Nitrogen in production and have some experience in it.

Our main aim is to investigate far further ways of Nitrogen evolution.

Project highlights:

-- Binary page construction

-- Binary data transfer

-- Pure WebSockets nature of events

-- Optimization for latency and capacity

-- Clean codebase

We called it Nitrogen 2 Optimized (N2O). Main feature is WebSockets

async interface for page updates. No processes spawn, works within

Cowboy processes. Page render is several times faster than

original Nitrogen.

We choose Nitrogen for simple and elegant way of typed HTML page

construction like in Scala Lift, OCaml Ocsigen and Haskell Happstack.

Templated based approach pushes to to deal with raw HTML, like

Yesod, ASP, PHP, JSP, Rails, Yaws, ChicagoBoss. N2O goes further

and optimize rendering from binary iolists instead of slow Erlang

lists originated by Nitrogen.

We’ve measured all existing modern web frameworks with latest

functional languages and Cowboy still the king. You can see raw

HTTP performance of functional and C-like languages with concurrent

primitives (Go, D and Rust) on VAIO Z notebook with i7640M processor:

http://synrc.com/framework/web/

We outperform full Nitrogen stack with only 2X downgrade of

raw HTTP Cowboy performance thus rise rendering performance

several times in compare to any other functional web framework

and for sure it is faster than raw HTTP node.js performance.

N2O doesn’t use JSON, all message data passed over WebSockets

encoded with native Erlang External Term Format which is easily

parsed in JavaScript with Bert.decode(msg) and helps to avoid

complexity on server-side.

Original Nitrogen was tested in production under high-load and

we decided to drop out nprocreg process registry along with

action_comet heavy process creation. N2O now creates only

one process for async websocket handler, all async operations

are handled withing Cowboy processes.

We feel free to brake original Nitrogen compatibility because

we want to have clean codebase and investigate future ways

of evolution. However we still able to easily port old Nitrogen

web sites to N2O.

We return back id and class semantics of HTML and removed html_id.

We simplify render without html_encode which should be handled by

application layer. nitrogen.js originaly created by Rusty for XHR

was removed due to pure WebSocket nature of N2O and native

jQuery handling. E.g. 

            #button { id=sendButton, text=<<"Send">>, postback=chat }

renders to:

<input id="sendButton" type="button" class="sendButton button" value="Send"/>

<script>$('#sendButton').bind('click',function anonymous(event) { 

      ws.send(Bert.encodebuf({source: Bert.binary('sendButton'), 

                              pickle: Bert.binary('R2LH0INQAAAAWXicy2DKYEt...'),

                              x: Bert.binary('undefined')}));});</script>

Despite early stages of project we decided to write this letter to

all users of Nitrogen. Our intention is to make all of them more

happy from using Nitrogen.

However we still continue to use original Nitrogen over XHR basically due

to customer's browser compatibility needs. Also we want to thank all

users who contributes code to the greatest Erlang Web Framework.

You can give stars, spawn forks and follow us here:

https://github.com/5HT/n2o -- N2O core

https://github.com/5HT/n2o-release -- Sample in form of Erlang release

-- 

Maxim Sokhatsky

Synrc Research Center

http://synrc.com/

[Jesse Gumm]

Hi Maxim!

Very cool project.  I like the idea of pushing Nitrogen's limits, even if it means forking it and breaking backwards compatibility for experimental purposes. After all, that's the best way to try new concepts and experiments.

I actually noticed your Twitter post about it, and did a Google translate from Russian for your blog post (http://maxim.livejournal.com/407472.html), so I had an idea this was coming.

I definitely agree with many of the decisions you've pushed it: Binaries/iolists and websockets in particular.  The lack of websockets in stock Nitrogen is an obvious deficiency and one I've been planning on doing, but with backwards compatibility and a fallback to comet/ajax if necessary. Binaries as well, need more love, and a lot of the Nitrogen internals can benefit from being "binarized" to speed up rendering.

Overall, kudos to you guys and thank you for sharing!

-Jesse

P.S. I may want to steal some of your changes and merge them into mainline Nitrogen, if that's okay :)

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--
Jesse Gumm
Owner, Sigma Star Systems
414.940.4866 || sigma-star.com || @jessegumm

[Max Lapshin]

As I've already mentioned in that livejournal's post, websockets are very cool, but they are not 100% ready for everywhere.

Don't forget, that nginx, packed in current distributions, still cannot proxy websockets. It means that in 99% cases one would not be able to put nitrogen on one IP with some other service.

So, websockets must have some fallback.

[Jesse Gumm]

Absolutely, I agree completely.

I wouldn't do a complete 100% switch toward websockets. If the browser and server support websockets, it would fallback, either to a flash-based socket solution (probably not) to emulate websockets (I did something like this years ago to build a trivia/chat system), or just fall back to comet (far more likely - no reason to muddle up the codebase with flash. Ugh, just saying that makes me feel a little dirty).

The positive thing is that at least nginx's current version does support websockets, but it'll almost certainly be a while (year or two?) before it's packaged into the standard distros (my Ubuntu 12.04 is using nginx 1.1, while the earliest nginx with websockets is 1.3).

But it never hurts to start preparing for the future.

-Jesse

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