First I thought I’d develop the practical examples for my RESTifying Procurement experiment on the basis of Jersey but fortunately before I started I realized the obvious opportunity to dive into Erlang and CouchDB. Hence here we go.
This is a very brief list of more or less painful steps I had to go through to set up a basic environment on the server hosted by my ISP:
- Download latest Erlang sources from erlang.org
- Run configure script…to find out that my ISP provides only a considered-broken gcc with its SuSE distro and updates
- Download newer, fixed gcc sources and compile fixed gcc with broken gcc
- Compile Erlang with fixed gcc (smooth compile and install now)
- Download Yaws
- Compile, install, configure and start Yaws (super easy)
- Download CouchDB
- Compile, install CouchDB
In between I had to add PackMan’s SuSE repository to yast to get hold of some packages that are apparently unknown to my ISP’s SuSE repository and figuring this out was rather time consuming because I usually do not spend much time with SuSE administration issues these days.
I had two Erlang books (Erlang Programming and Programming Erlang) waiting on my shelf for me and spent my (little) free time over the weekend to get my feet wet. So far, I am mostly fascinated because I have never done functional programming before.
What I found kind of difficult was to find documentation and code snippets and decide about their quality and whether they reflect current practice. Here is the list of links I have dug up so far and consider prime content:
- The Erlang Web site
- The Yaws Web site
- RESTful Web services with Erlang and Yaws (Steve Vinoski)
- Build you next Web application with Erlang (Dave Bryson, Steve Vinoski)
- A RESTful we service demo in yaws (Nick Gerakines)
- Steve Vinsoki’s blog
- Nick Gerakines’ blog
- Erlang – software for a concurrent world (Presentation by Joe Armstrong)
- Systems that never stop (and Erlang) (Presentation by Joe Armstrong)
- (UPDATE) OTP Design Principles User’s Guide
That’s it for now. When I dig up more articles I’ll append them here.