Please introduce yourself!

[Joel Reymont]

Folks,

Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

Thanks, Joel

[Toby DiPasquale]

On Nov 29, 10:07 pm, Joel Reymont <joe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

Hi everybody,

My name's Toby and I hail from outside of Philadelphia, PA in the US.
I've been interested in Erlang for about 2 years now and we used both
RabbitMQ and ejabberd with small bespoke modifications internally at
my last company, Invite Media. I got interested in Erlang because I
was a Linux kernel engineer for 5 years and I've seen the dark side of
concurrency and how hard it is to get it right, especially with highly-
loaded network systems. Erlang definitely gets it right, IMHO. I wish
I'd known about it in 2002 when we built the first TurnTide
appliance! ;-)

For me, I'd love to see some more off-the-beaten-path topics covered
in The Erlang Journal. You can find tutorials and examples of network
services in Erlang in a lot of places these days. For example, I think
this initial build-a-social-network tack is really fantastic from two
perspectives: 1. Joel has the experience and skills to build a quality
implementation of a social network in Erlang that we could all learn
from, and 2. this is a common problem in the industry and not
something Erlang is known to be good at. Other things that might be
interesting topics are:

* a microblogging service that actually scales (i.e. not Yariv's
thing)
* a cluster management/monitoring service
* an online gin rummy game

As well, I'm still interested in the _Hardcore Erlang_ topic of
building a trading system of some sort, especially now that Betfair
just launched TradeFair (essentially, a virtual derivatives market
based on their existing gaming platform). Joel would kill at learning
us on some trading platforms ;-)

--
Toby DiPasquale

[Rusty Klophaus]

Warm greetings everyone,

My name is Rusty Klophaus. I currently live in Arlington, VA with my
beautiful wife, Alex, and I've been working with Erlang since February
'08.

I became interested in Erlang after building several large distributed
applications (100+ GB of operational data per day, 200+ servers) in C#
and thinking to myself, "Man, there has got to be a simpler way."

I'm currently using Erlang for parts of my company (http://
stitcho.com), as well as a number of side projects. I'm the author of
the Nitrogen Web Framework (http://github.com/rklophaus/nitrogen),
which has gotten some buzz lately because of a video I posted (http://
nitrogen-erlang.tumblr.com/post/54797864/flickr-on-nitrogen).

What I'd really like to see covered here is:

- Hard numbers on Mnesia performance and limitations
- Investigative pieces that result in a working implementation of an
OpenID client, a YAML parser, or some other library useful for
enterprise software
- More examples of how the OTP libraries can be used.
- Any other cool stuff Joel can think of. :)

Best,
Rusty

[nside]

Hello,

I'm a software developer & entrepreneur based in Quebec, Canada. I've
been spending some time learning erlang to see if I could apply its
power to the GIS domain. Here are some things I want to build/do/
learn:
- spatial indexing (rtree/quadtree) (on top of mnesia)
- measure performances on geometry processing (either in pure erlang
or through a c-port) in a heavily (smp * many nodes) distributed
environment
- I noticed the lack of FFI (foreign function interface) support,
maybe it'd be nice to have a generic solution to that problem
(something similar to python's ctype)
- What are the operational pitfalls in a multi-nodes environment? How
can I manage/monitor them? I saw some nice projects by the Dukes of
erl (most notably fragmentron) on google code and it would be nice to
see them in action. And get to know the other alternatives?
- Description of a typical dev to prod deployment pipeline (with
tests & live code updates)

Thanks for setting the erlang journal,
Denis

[Justin]

> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

Hello everyone,

My name's Justin and I live in London [UK] with my wife Sharla and son
William.

My background is in financial services; I'm interested in using Erlang
for building trading systems, coming from a Ruby/Rails background. I'm
interested in how I can use Erlang to improve on my existing Rails
stack; I'd like to understand

- how I can use Mnesia to replace a relational database, particularly
with arbitrary data structures [I've lost count of the number of times
I serialize Ruby structures to YAML and save them as text in an
relational database]
- how I can use Erlang's concurrency primitives to grab/parse data
from multiple sources without it killing my performance [I currently
use Heroku for Rails deployment; unfortunately they don't support
BackgroundRb; the best I can do is expose some methods as web services
and have an external cron job call them; let's just say it doesn't
work that well]
- what web layer should I be using for a front end ? Rusty's Nitrogen
framework ? Something else ? [Whatever I build, I want to give it a
browser- based front end; what should I use that's as simple as Rails'
ActiveRecord ?]
- how I can deploy an Erlang system easily on EC2 ? [Heroku is great
for Rails applications; what can we do with Erlang ?]

Someone mentioned Betfair/Tradefair; great idea! Let's build some kind
of automated trading app that uses the Betfair API.

Best wishes,

Justin

[Magnus Falk]

Hi people,

I'm Magnus Falk and I reside in Linköping, Sweden where I work at Ericsson doing LTE (the next telecom standard that promises 150Mbit over the air). We use Erlang Common Test as our test environment to stub certain parts of the node as well as the mobiles and other stuff that talks to the node. I've been interested in Erlang since I read about distribution and CORBA at defmacro.org (I used to work with CORBA a lot at my previous job *shudder*).

I would really like to learn more about web development but have no background in that area whatsoever, so building a Django-like framework in Erlang from the ground up sounds really exciting!

Other than that I really consider myself still a Java guy since I'm still more or less a n00b when it comes to functional programming.

Cheers,
Magnus

[Joel Reymont]

My name is Joel and I live in Tenerife, an island off the coast of
Africa [1]. I'm 34 and have two daughters. The youngest is making
things a bit hard at the moment but we are coping :-).

Here's my author blurb from the unfinished Hardcore Erlang book...

---
Joel Reymont first started coding at a tender young age of 14, on his
lap, duri
ng long bus trips from school to his father's place north of Havana.
His Basic p
rograms were entered into the lone PC at the power plant in Santa Cruz
del Norte
, Cuba. With a firm grasp of Unix, he left college in St. Petersburg,
Russia, at
the age of 18 and made a brief stop at Long Island University in
Brooklyn, New
York, shortly after.

Passing through a year-long coding bootcamp in Marin County,
California, he cont
inued on to Wall St, where he spent most of his career and finished as
Director
of Prime Brokerage Technology at Deutsche Bank at the age of 24 [2].

Following a brief stint selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Joel
switched to w
riting gaming software for casinos in the Caribbean and running an
offshore deve
lopment firm. After living 3 more years in Russia, Joel settled on the
sunny Spa
nish island of Tenerife with his wife, and has been enjoying the lazy
island life
style for the past 4 years.
---

I found Erlang after realizing I didn't know how to scale my Lisp
poker engine. The first rewrite took a few weeks and I've been
rewriting OpenPoker ever since, always in Erlang.

I haven't been successful with poker and would like to live the past
behind. The Erlang Journal is both a new business venture and
psychological relief at the same time. I collected a fair amount of
information while writing Hardcore Erlang and will be sharing it with
you over time.

Last but not least, I have a number of crazy Erlang projects in mind
like a Mac Cocoa bridge, trading software and others. I should be able
to dedicate myself full-time to writing code for The Erlang Journal,
so long as the number of subscribers allows it.

Thank you for your support, Joel

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife
[2] http://wagerlabs.com/resume.pdf

--
http://twitter.com/wagerlabs

[bernied]

Hello y'all,

My name is Bernhard Damberger and I live in Sunnyvale California. As
of now I currently work at Yahoo (we shall see next week if that’s
still true) as a software developer. Most of my work is in Java, with
some painful excursions into shell scripting. I work on part of the
advertising system, and I have pestered my boss a couple of times
about using erlang, since it would be perfect for what we are doing.
No luck so far.

My work (if you can call it that) in erlang is of the "side project"
nature. I discovered erlang a few years back, probably from reading
lambda-the-ulitmate.org. I like reading about programming languages,
and the more I read about erlang the more I became convinced that this
was a great language. The only thing I have "published" in erlang is
http://code.google.com/p/erlawys. I talked to the owner of
http://code.google.com/p/erlaws, about merging the projects, but I
haven't done anything about that yet.

Things that interest me in the world of erlang:
-Mnesia backends. I know Joel has a fair amount of experience with
that. Might be interesting to make a mnesia backend that uses AWS
SimpleDB.
-Mac Cocoa-bridge (being a Mac developer in my pre-java life).
-Web based scaleable/distributed systems.
-Web based payment systems.
-Information retrieval systems (including search engines).

I am looking forward to hearing what Joel and others have to say about
erlang.

_bernhard

[al...@shafir.net]

Hi, Everybody,

My name's Alex Shafir and I'm greeting you from Lake Forest, IL
located in the North Shore area of Chicagoland in USA (42°14'5”N
87°51'3”W). I found Erlang about a year ago, being frustrated with
usual problems of the shared state concurrency I had to deal with. I
have 15 years of experience building software infrastructure for
securities trading companies, big and small, and had my fair share of
these problems. So, I'm interested in Erlang as a potential tool for
messaging, price servers, exchange gateways, etc. where everything is
LAN connected behind a firewall and Erlang “all or nothing” security
paradigm is perfectly OK. I am currently in process of building a
prototypical FIX gateway in Erlang. I have seen so many developers
from proprietary trading operations spending most of the time in never
ending debugging and modification of their FIX gateway engines. So, I
decided to try Erlang as a tool for that kind of development.

What I'd like to see covered are issues like using IE library for
building C-nodes, and building a C++ wrapper for IE that would
eventually allow to build “C++ nodes”. I'm also very interested in all
Mnesia related issues as well.

That's my current prospective for Erlang. I have absolutely no
experience in building software for social networking, but will be
very interested in the issues involved.

Yours,
-- Alex Shafir

[Eli Liang]

I'm Eli Liang. I'd like to learn some more Erlang. I'm live in
suburban Maryland. hi again Rusty!

I'd like to watch the process of an Erlang program getting developed
and look into the mind of the developer. I really don't know what I
will do with Erlang though as I haven't done any real programming in
about 20 years, but I suppose some ideas may occur to me with the
passing of time.

[Joel Reymont]

On Dec 3, 2008, at 12:40 AM, al...@shafir.net wrote:

> I am currently in process of building a
> prototypical FIX gateway in Erlang. I have seen so many developers
> from proprietary trading operations spending most of the time in never
> ending debugging and modification of their FIX gateway engines. So, I
> decided to try Erlang as a tool for that kind of development.

Oy, FIX gateway!

Alex, are you employed by one of the trading shops in Chicago?

I bought a Cisco 877W to be able to connect to the Chicago Mercantile
Exchange (CME) and test my FIX gateway implementation. My idea was to
be able to auto-trade futures after developing profitable trading
algorithms. A trading friend of mine offered to fund a seat at the
exchange if he could verify my simulated trading results.

FIX is something that I can use on my Mac whereas all the other
trading connections are Windows only.

I still haven't gotten to implementing the gateway, btw, so I'd love
to see what you come up with.

Thanks, Joel

--
http://twitter.com/wagerlabs

[Nestor Pestelos]

> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

Hello,

I'm 27 and a programmer from Manila, Philippines. I'm here to learn as
much as I can.

I've been studying Erlang since 2006 when I had the chance to use
ejabberd on a project. This year I took a detour from Erlang and
picked up other languages such as Python, Scala, and Groovy.

Looking forward to learning from your experiences using Erlang in the
field. Also, if you could provide examples of problems where Erlang
should not be used.


Nestor

[Alex Shafir]

Joel,

I was employed till last August by a hedge fund company, laid off (as most of the developers) because of the huge losses the company suffered. Doing consulting gigs currently (C++/database related), looking for a new role.

The FIX gateway idea was inspired by discussions with friends running a statistical arbitrage engine at a small NYC based trading company. I agreed to do a technology research for them to evaluate if Erlang can be a practical tool for that kind of development.

The project goes erratically (too much C++ in between). Currently I have the session level working, more or less,  against the testing service. I will try to come out with some details of where we are in terms  of code in the coming days. It's far from anything like a really usable FIX gateway yet. I spent a lot of time learning how to do parsing of incoming FIX messages coming as binaries, and how to build them as binaries, using all the latest compiler optimizations. Did a lot of  benchmarking until I got it fast enough. Can this parsing/building binaries be of any interest for the Journal in your opinion?

Currently we are stuck with the messaging issue. The clients are all multi-threaded/low latency "pedal-to-the-metal" C++. By now we managed to narrow our options to just two: AMQP/RabbitMq or native Erlang messaging. There is no C++ client provided with RabbitMq. Existing clients (OpenAMQ etc.) are not compatible with RabbitMq in terms of the protocol versions. Native Erlang messaging currently requires building C-nodes using EI library. The C++ guys are used to Boost etc. They would like to have a C++ kind of framework above the EI library. So, we are over the barrel choosing which way to go, building/modifying an AMQP client (STOMP solution isn't deemed acceptable), or building our own C++ wrapper framework over the EI library?

-- Alex Shafir

[Tony Arcieri]

Hello everyone,

I'm Tony Arcieri. If you've heard of me it's probably because of Reia
(http://wiki.reia-lang.org), an Erlangy scripting language drawing
inspiration from Ruby and Python. I can't say I'm really doing a lot
with Erlang besides using it as the basis of my own language.
However, if you've ever had a hankering to create your own languages,
Erlang is a great platform to do it on. The degree to which the
compiler and code server are accessible within the Erlang runtime is
more than I've seen in practically any other language.

--
Tony Arcieri

[grant michaels]

Hi Tony,

I've been following the Reia mailing list and have meant to inquire as to whether you are using the Rubinius specs for Reia or not?

I guess that would be RuBEAM or something =)

best personal regards,
 
-[ grantmichaels ]-
 
> Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 20:47:49 -0800
> Subject: Re: Please introduce yourself!
> From: bas...@gmail.com
> To: think...@googlegroups.com

[Chris Bernard]

> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!
>
>     Thanks, Joel

Hi Everyone,

My name's Chris and I live close to Philadelphia, PA, USA, with my
wife Dena and a mini-wiener dog named "Java". Dena has almost
convinced me to get another dog by allowing us to call it "Erlang".
With that name I'm thinking it would have to be a really alien looking
dog, though, like maybe an Italian Greyhound.

Network programming has been a long-time interest. At a couple
startups I've built concurrent systems of distributed collaborating
objects in Blub, er.. Java (Multicast, CORBA, Sockets, SNMP), but have
felt the pain associated with ever-increasing accidental complexity
just to support all the 'ilities' of the system.

Sexy Ruby has been fun for websites and tool scripts, but the weak
concurrency support really limits my relationship with her.

I got interested in Erlang/OTP last year, discovering that it was
created to build my favorite type of software -- truly collaborating
objects that have long, strong, interesting lives. I've read Joe's
great book, built some toys, contributed some code to erlyweb, but am
looking to learn more about:

* data persistence strategies
* OTP design trade-offs
* common design problems
* monitoring and pain points in long running clusters

Chris

[Joel Reymont]

Chris,

On Dec 3, 2008, at 6:26 PM, Chris Bernard wrote:

> I got interested in Erlang/OTP last year, discovering that it was
> created to build my favorite type of software -- truly collaborating
> objects that have long, strong, interesting lives.

What kind of MMORPG is that? ;-)

--
http://wagerlabs.com

[Chris Bernard]

Everlang.

--
Chris Bernard
LogicLeaf

[Russell]

My name is Russell. I'm a contract Java developer working mainly in
the grim North of England. Of late I have worked mainly on Video On
Demand. I've had computers all my life and hacked away since my dad
did a comp sci. OU course when I was a kid but I have no formal
education in software, engineering, maths, or any of the things I find
interesting. I have got into FP in general and Erlang in particular
mainly 'cos I enjoy them. I especially like Erlang's pattern matching.
I'm more of a Joel backer than anything. Having seen him on the Erlang
mailing list then watched his blog and his twitter action I feel sure
something exceptional is building around him and I'm just following my
intuition. Worst case is this small investment pays off with me
learning a lot more FP and Erlang.

Practically I just do the Project Euler stuff and start to hack out
the odd idea. My current side project is ad hoc, impromptu last.fm
chat groups for people listening to the same song at the same time.
Ejabberd would seem to be one ingredient, maybe Nitrogen is another.

Hi!

Russell

[Matt Heitzenroder]

Hello everyone,

First of all, congratulations Dave on RightScale closing on the latest
venture round. It was cool to see your email in my inbox this morning
after reading about RightScale yesterday.

My name is Matt Heitzenroder and I live in Miami FL and work remotely
for a SugarCRM based in Cupertino, CA. I spend my days consulting
enterprises on how to scale PHP and tearing my hair out (I keep it
short to prevent that). In my free coding time, I long to write clean
and scalable code in Python (including Django) and/or Erlang.

By joining this list, I hope that I increase my skill as an Erlang
programmer, but I also help to further the Erlang community. I hope
through passionate advocacy and disciplined study that I one day find
myself working with Erlang professionally and not just as hobbie.

And when I'm not doing any of that stuff, I'm out sailing.

Cheers,
Matt Heitzenroder

http://twitter.com/roder
http://linkedin.com/in/mheitzenroder
http://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Heitzenroder/654508311



On Dec 9, at 3:36 AM, David Welch wrote:

>
> Hello everyone,
>
> My name is David Welch and I live in Santa Barbara, CA where I work at
> RightScale. I've been wanting to pick up a FP language so I started
> learning Erlang about a month ago and I see it as a great fit for the
> EC2 environment. I'm working with Erlang on my own time so I'd love to
> see some tutorials and follow along with whatever side projects come
> out of this.
>
> Previously, I was working on a Ad Platform idea my friend and I had
> using python and flex, but we had to shelve it once I became too busy
> with work and he went back to grad school. I might try to re-implement
> it in Erlang, but I would also be interested in a trading program
> using FIX and really just following along with any of the projects
> covered here so I can catch up to speed...Looking forward in seeing
> how these projects/topics covered her evolve!
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
> >

[MS]

Hello all,

my name is Martin. I stumbled upon erlang about 9 Months ago when the
count of daily erlang reddits reached about 1. Like (most erlangers?)
I bought the Armstrong bible and am erlang-infected since then.

At work, we have migrated many parts of our software from C/C++ to
erlang. We have had tremendous success by this. The codesize shrunk to
~1/10th of it was before, the software is more reliable, extendible,
etc..

By joining, I hope to see more real-world examples of OTP usage, learn
more erlang "rules-of-thumb" and in general learn more about erlang/
OTP software designs and approaches.


Martin

[James Avery]

Hi Everyone,
My name is James Avery and I was introduced to Erlang by Kevin Smith
at a Raleigh.rb meeting. I am still learning, but between Kevin's
screencasts, our local Erlang Hack Night, and the Armstrong book I
think I am picking it up fairly quickly. I currently run a pair of
advertising networks and I am planning on moving the ad serving engine
to Erlang and then move it to EC2.

-James

--
James Avery
Infozerk Inc.
http://www.infozerk.com

[Dimitar Bakardzhiev]

Hi everybody,

My name is Dimitar Bakardzhiev and I live in Bulgaria, Europe.
I am a software developer and entrepreneur working mostly on Java
projects for international clients.

I became interested in Erlang because I want to shape the future of my
company along the best available technologies.

What I'd like to see covered here is ideas and implementations of
business applications written in Erlang.

Thank you for starting this journal,
Dimitar

[Viktor Sovietov]

Hi folks,

My name's Victor, I'm owner of Massive Solutions Limited, that's the
company which using Erlang as main platform to develop the wide range
of applications, from HPC (high-performance computing AKA
supercomputers' stuff) to massive multiplayer services (http://
life4fun.mobi, it's multiplayer service for java-enabled mobile
phones), also we develop hardware solutions for Erlang clusters (fast
low-latency interconnect, no TCP/IP between nodes, advanced nodes'
monitoring, cheap distributed storages, etc, etc, etc). I have been
using Erlang for different projects for 8 years (first project was a
business rule processing engine, what's a pain to remember!), it
allows me to avoid any illusions about this technology but build
balanced architectures with using Erlang's advantages.
And, after all, coding in Erlang is fun! I'm seldom conding right now,
but I found that managing teams and training new programmers is the
same fun, so I never miss old good times of hard coding :)

I'm always interested to be in touch with other professionals in this
area, Erlang community is still not so big (particulary, in my
country) and I would be happy to find any form of synergy with
colleagues, especially, if say about Joel ;) His stamina and great
pith are really impressive.

Sincerely,

--Victor

[Matt Smith]

Hi,

I live and work in Huntsville, AL. The company I work for has a need
to be able to process requests coming from (hopefully soon, we launch
soon) a lot of devices sending data restfully to our servers. Each
device sends updates every minute, although each update is a small
amount of data. Right now the server processing these requests is
written in Ruby. As the need to scale increases, Erlang looks more
and more like a good solution. We are considering in version 2 to
have the server rewritten in Erlang. We are also considering
embedding an XMPP client in our devices and our server would then be
based on ejabberd. So I have been researching / learning Erlang. To
support the Restful server I am planning on releasing the code as a
project called Resterly, it is very early stage now.

Thanks,

Matt
http://mattsmith.me

[Joel Reymont]

Matt,

On Dec 9, 2008, at 10:37 PM, Matt Smith wrote:

> a lot of devices sending data restfully to our servers. Each
> device sends updates every minute, although each update is a small
> amount of data.

Let me guess... sensors!

--
http://wagerlabs.com

[Martin Scholl]

Hello Victor,

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Viktor Sovietov <victor....@gmail.com> wrote: 

[snip]

also we develop hardware solutions for Erlang clusters (fast
low-latency interconnect, no TCP/IP between nodes, advanced nodes'
monitoring, cheap distributed storages, etc, etc, etc).

Can you provide us with more information? I already found [1], but didn't find any details about your hardware.


Martin

[1]      http://massivesolutions.co.uk/products.html

[Alex Ott]

Hi all

On Nov 30, 4:07 am, Joel Reymont <joe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

My name is Alex Ott. I'm software developer from Germany. Erlang is
interested for me as a possible platform for my open source projects -
content filtering solutions with ability to scale to handle big number
of simultaneous connections

--
With best wishes, Alex Ott, MBA
http://alexott.blogspot.com/ http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/
http://alexott-ru.blogspot.com/

[codea...@gmail.com]

Hi Joel,

Yes, sensors. The sensors send information to gateway and the gateway sends the information on to the server.

Thanks,

Matt

[Michele Sciabarra]

Michele Sciabarra', Italy.

We have a database of many giga of classical music and we want to
create a Web site to offer this to the general public.
I am using Erlang because I believe scalability is of paramount
importance. Most likely we will use Amazon EC2.

Also the user interface will be in Javascript and Flex, and I see that
using ActionScript/JavaScript with Erlang is very natural and effective
(Javascript is very functional after all, and sending a json message in
Ajax is easy to translate in a message sent to an erlang process).

I am avoiding any Erlang web framework, because I feel they are not ajax
friendly. With Ajax, the whole classic MVC with actions is obsolete.
Instead, just simple yaws page for templating is enough, and a simple
appmod to translate json messages to process makes an environment simple
and elegant.

[Martin Scholl]

Hello Michele,

have you already considered nitrogen? nitrogen is ajax plus elegance plus functional programming ;-)

Martin

[Michele Sciabarra]

Martin Scholl ha scritto:

> Hello Michele,
>
> have you already considered nitrogen? nitrogen is ajax plus elegance
> plus functional programming ;-)

I have thefeeling that yet there is not a prevalent Erlang web framework.
So I am trying to be minimalist. I have found that just using yaws pages
works for the templating side of my project.
I have found that a simple appmod, jquery and a few processes started by
a supervisor is also ok for me.
I write html forms (now, flex later), I collect data in Javascript and
send ajax messages that became terms in erlang...
Also yaws translates for me term in HTML.

For now I feel no needs to use a framework... This may change later.

[grant michaels]

I feel that Flex clients (be it Air desktop app or flashplayer in browser) talking to Erlang backends seem to be a natural solution to a lot of web development pain - especially since 1) coding to SWF eliminates a lot of the pain of cross-browser incompatibility and 2) since Erlang/Mnesia (or CouchDB) scale out so nicely relatively speaking ...

I keep saying the same thing, but, writing the Erlang side of the SWX or AMF client seems to be a very logical next step for Erlang's increased adoption ... but it isn't happening anywhere - at least, not in the open source ... I tried unpacking AMF w/ Erlang's bit syntax and found my Erlang competency was not up to par (yet) ...

best personal regards,
 
-[ grantmichaels ]-

> Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:52:11 +0000
> From: mic...@sciabarra.com
> To: think...@googlegroups.com

> Subject: Re: Please introduce yourself!
>
>

[Michele Sciabarra]

>
> I keep saying the same thing, but, writing the Erlang side of the SWX
> or AMF client seems to be a very logical next step for Erlang's
> increased adoption ... but it isn't happening anywhere - at least, not
> in the open source ... I tried unpacking AMF w/ Erlang's bit syntax
> and found my Erlang competency was not up to par (yet) ...

There has been a discussion recently on Erlang-Question mailing list
regarding AMF libraries. It seems there is a number of options. For
example the eswf has a AMF encoder/decoder. For the time being however I
am sticking to simple xml encoding and decoding...

[grant michaels]

Now I feel really dumb, because Bob Ippolito (mochi) rec'd eswf to me like a two or three months ago, and I wasn't sure why ...

I guess I should look again, more closely this time ...

Thanks ...

best personal regards,
 
-[ grantmichaels ]-

> Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:55:08 +0000

> From: mic...@sciabarra.com
> To: think...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Please introduce yourself!
>
>
>
> >

[Federico Feroldi]

On Nov 30, 4:07 am, Joel Reymont <joe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!

Hi everybody,

my name is Federico Feroldi, I'm 33 and I live in Milan, Italy. I have
more than twelve years of experience in designing, developing,
integrating and managing complex solutions for Internet-based
companies. I have worked for Yahoo! as a senior architect engineer
where I've developed my interest in highly scalable and distributed
architectures.

I got in touch with Erlang a couple of years ago when I was looking
for a new language to learn and I immediately fall in love with its
dynamic structure and its functional syntax.
Since then I wrote about it on my blog (http://www.pixzone.com/blog/
category/erlang/) and I also wrote a couple of introductory articles
on an Italian programming magazine.

Recently I got interested in cloud computing (i.e. Amazon Elastic
Cloud) and parallel processing (Hadoop) and I would like to exploit
Erlang on these two fields of interest.

I'm currently evaluating a very specific application of cloud
computing and Erlang that is a framework for doing massively scalable
and on demand monte-carlo simulations applied to the financial sector
(for financial derivatives pricing).

And last but not least, I hope you're going to finish your Hardcore
Erlang book since I wasn't completely satisfied by Joe's Programming
Erlang book. :)

-
Federico Feroldi
http://www.linkedin.com/in/feroldi

[Jim McCoy]

Hello all!

I'm Jim McCoy, live in the SF bay area, and have been building and
running large-scale distributed systems for a decade or so and
noodling around with Erlang in my free time for almost three years
(after getting burned-out on beating my head against the wall with
Twisted/Python.) Having had the opportunity to spend a bit more time
on Erlang recently I picked up an old project I set aside and am
currently writing a DHT storage engine for immutable data based
loosely on the Kademlia system. Eventually I hope to throw something
like Jay Nelson's process-based caching system on top of it and see if
it can offer any advantages over the ubiquitous memcache system.

jim

[josh_wnj]

gday everyone,

I'm Josh from Melbourne Australia. My career so far has been in
coding web apps - so php, javascript and all their buddies.

I started looking into erlang about a year ago because I wanted to
broaden my horizons and learn something new. It didn't take long
before I was struck by its potential for the web, and enjoyment of
coding in it.

I work for X-Team, with colleagues and clients around the globe, and
one of my main roles is in developing tools for online team
collaboration. We're hoping to release our first few erlang-based
applications soon, so in the meantime I'm racing to learn as much as I
can.

Nice to meet you all.

[Victor Sovetov]

Hi Martin

There is no information on site yet. Actually, site is a bit outdated,
our clients aren't often visitors there :)

Our hardware solution will be presented on one of HPC events next
summer, it's not ready yet (for end-users). We've been using this
technology inside our own company for 1.5 years, and sell systems for
our clients (to those who asks for) . We found that Erlang is the
great platform to develop massive applications but it still could be
better with some advanced hardware support (heh, if we can't replace
Mnesia we still can turn "the worst" to "not so painful", right?).
Unfortunately, there is no good documentation, and we want to change
some things in OTP to support some advanced features of the hw
platform.

If describe the solution shortly it's the chassis with up to 32
physical servers, each server has 4 network interfaces (2 low-latency
interconnect ports and 2 10GB Ethernet ports). All servers run patched
Linux as well as patched beams, modified to use fast interconnect for
linking Erlang nodes without using any system calls (it saves a lot of
CPU cycles which would be wasted to switch on kernel's context). Our
Linux distribution contains modified kernel to run beams as
efficiently as it possible and to use all disks in servers as one,
big, cost-effective, fault-tolerant distributed storage. Each chassis
contains one dedicated server to run monitoring and administration
tasks. With using external switches those chassis can be used as
bricks to build big server farms. Probably it isn't an ideal solution,
but if you need to run really big Erlang apps (such as Facebook chat)
or if you don't want to fight with slow Mnesia replication and prefer
to entrust all replication works to fast hardware level... well, the
one I described above would help a bit, i think.

Sincerely,

--Victor

[Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt]

Hi!

I'm Dmitrii, a developer from Moldova. I've been circling around
Erlang for he past couple of years, just couldn't get myself into a
project with Erlang.

I'm currently running a Russian erlang-related site at http://erlang.dmitriid.com/
which is, surprisingly, somewhat popular among Russian users of Erlang



On Nov 30 2008, 5:07 am, Joel Reymont <joe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,

>
> Please introduce yourselves and let me know why you subscribed, what
> are you doing with Erlang and what are you looking forward to!
>

>     Thanks, Joel

[Tabajara R. M.]

Hi everyone, 

First of all, happy new year!

My name is Tabajara and I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As far I can see, Erlang is totally unknown here.

I've heard about Erlang two years ago, but I started to learn a few weeks. 

I've been working in different web projects, web languages and databases in the last ten years, but Erlang remember my days as delphi programmer. 

I'm still in the basics and hoping to have more time to build something useful; probably a simple chat server to start. 

-- 
Tabajara R. M.
taba...@gmail.com