And how is CB better than Zotonic?

[szymonpi...@gmail.com]

I have spent some time with zotonic, this is a great project, yet I quickly discovered it is quite complicated, the documentation is really bad and it fails to meet some of my needs (e.g. riak integration).

I have asked a similar question the zotonic community:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=zotonic+users&oq=zotonic+users&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3j69i59.5312j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Has anyone gone into trouble of comparing the two frameworks and I mean the inner workings and implementation details of the two frameworks rather than just functionalities?

And how fast and reliable CB really is? The makers of zotonic give an example of the voting project they have managed showing how zotonic easily managed with heavy load and the 100% availability requirements.  

Has anyone thought about running a TechEmpower test etc?

[Nicholas Whittier]

You'll find at least a few users overlapping both groups, and my guess is that both sides will have similar thoughts.

Some thoughts from a light user of both:

1. As David mentioned on another post here, chicagoboss is in a bit of a transitional state at the moment, so expect things to be changing/coalescing over the next several months.

2. While Zotonic is a web framework, it's tightly organized around zotonic as a CMS. Similar to the way you can use the underlying Drupal or Joomla framework if you wanted, but you could also build a site via custom modules that integrate at the CMS level (zotonic users/devs should chime in if I'm going too far with this). ChicagoBoss is more framework focused and has no CMS (though erlangcms.com is building a CMS on top of CB). I think this results in facts like Zotonic's limited database support or that you need to write your own user authentication in CB.

3. At the moment (prepare for a flagrant oversimplification), I'd present Zotonic and CB as something like Drupal and Symfony in the PHP world or Django and Flask in Python. I don't want to raise any framework/language wars here, I'm just highlighting that CMS's have a place, as do frameworks. There's often a lot of overlap, and in many cases it's a difficult decision between the two when you're starting a new project.

A thorough review and comparison between Zotonic and CB would be a great undertaking, but I think it would target a very niche audience. TechEmpower tests would also be great, but I think they make more sense at or after the 1.0 release.

For me, if I know I need generic users and content management, I use zotonic. If I want more control over users and database(s) or if I want an API, I use CB. It gets a little murky with more complex scenarios.

-- Nicholas

[Andreas Stenius]

I'm not too familiar with CB (I'm a Zotonic developer), but I feel Nicholas does a fair job in his comparison.

I'd just like to make a note regarding TechEmpower tests.

TechEmpower tests does a ton of micro-benchmarks that shows what kind of throughput you can get in a stripped/partial system on a single request.

If that fit your needs,  I suppose they are useful.

What they doesn't show is how the system performs under heavy-load, as a full-stack/application.

I bet their results would be quite different if they provided tests showing how the various frameworks degrade under pressure.

//Andreas

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[Jesse Gumm]

I wouldn't call any of the Erlang frameworks "better" than any others by virtue of how different each one is - each solves a different problem in a different way.

ChicagoBoss is intentionally similar to Rails and has adapters for a handful of different databases through boss_db, and does not come with much client-side stuff at all, other than DTL template generation.

Zotonic is a full-on CMS and uses (IIRC) PostreSQL exclusively, and does lots and lots of different things, both client and server-side.

Nitrogen (just to throw in the other framework) is an event-driven framework that models HTML and Javascript with Erlang terms and does not provide any built-in database adapters.

The decision on which framework to use, I would say, would come down to the type of application you're building, and what kind of environment you feel most comfortable using.

Generally speaking, Zotonic is the largest of the projects (and large usually goes along with more complicated), but it also does more for you. Nitrogen, on the other hand has the smallest of the "server-side" stuff, but provides some JS and HTML abstrations.  ChicagoBoss fits right in the middle there, doing more than Nitrogen (like database abstractions, email server, message queues, and the like), while doing less than Zotonic (where with Zotonic you can basically have a site without writing any code at all).

It all ultimately comes down to your preferred style, as far as I'm concerned.

As for performance, I know Concurrix provided some patches a while back to eliminate some of the bottlenecks in CB, significantly improving CB's performance (which was talked about at the Chicago Erlang Factory Lite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDvqPk3r0ug).  But a comparison between the CB and Zotonic I'm sure has not been done.  I'd worry less about which Erlang framework scales better, since you've already chosen a language known to scale quite well.  Performance improvements, when needed, are merely pull requests away :)

-Jesse

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Jesse Gumm
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