Rails Idioms + Django Templates + Erlang Power = Chicago Boss

http://www.chicagoboss.org/

by paulsmith • 17 years ago

143 79 17 years ago

chicagoboss.org

middus• 17 years ago

Buzz + Buzz + Buzz = Boss

Looks interesting, though.

tortilla• 17 years ago

A little bombastic, but I got a chuckle out of this line:

All other web frameworks will break down and cry if you ask them to process more than a few dozen simultaneous requests on a single machine.

njharman• 17 years ago

Chuckle?

Ignorance and/or disenguity(sp?) pisses me off. I'll read more but I'm getting the impression that people behind BOSS are one or more of inexperienced, clueless, full of them selves and thus not worth my time.

agazso• 17 years ago

Usually it's not the web framework itself that is unable to process the requests, but the web application in which one http request ends up in a few database requests, and the database is the real bottleneck.

By writing something in Erlang does not make your program automagically perform well (and this applies to CouchDB too).

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

The most basic cause for bad technical decisions are wrong assumptions about technology.

If you believe every other web framework will get crushed with a few dozen simultaneous requests, you will be absolutely sure this is the solution you have been waiting for.

I am curious to try Erlang out, but I know exactly how many dozen requests my current tools can handle. And it's a lot more than a couple.

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

If you can't get more than a couple dozen req/sec out of other things, you probably won't manage it with this, either.

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

I strongly dislike developing web front-ends in Erlang. However, if you are interested in doing so, please also see the comparably stable http://erlyweb.org/ by Yariv, who is a visible figure in Erlang web development.

johnohara• 17 years ago

Geographically: The University of Chicago

[edit]: Hey down-modder: It's the last entry on his website. What's the -1 for? Are you saying those of us from Chicago shouldn't be proud of our institutions? Asshat.

icey4• 17 years ago

My guess is that saying "Geographically: University of Chicago" doesn't really add anything to the conversation. Also, it wasn't in the linked page when I went there, so maybe there was some confusion.

Although, I just downmodded you because it seems like you've got a tough time being civil.

jrockway• 17 years ago

The server's IP is definitely not a UofC IP.

mattdennewitz• 17 years ago

you've never talked to anyone in chicago before, have you? zing!

sant0sk1• 17 years ago

"APIs will change, features may be broken, your car may explode when you turn the ignition, etc."

I think I'll wait awhile on this one...

Periodic2• 17 years ago

Yeah, I'm with you. I haven't found a way to load my car into a test sandbox where failure doesn't result in the loss of the car.

mbreese• 17 years ago

I have yet to find a way to get my car in a test sandbox* where success doesn't result in the loss of the car.

*Note: for this to work, you will need a large sandbox. If it is too small, your car will be fine, but just try explaining what happened to the sandbox to your kid.

jdbeast00• 17 years ago

blocked at work for potentially unsafe content? wow, this must be powerful

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

How is Chicago Boss different from Rails/Django/Mason/CakePHP/My Favorite MVC Framework?

Chicago Boss is fully asynchronous, using one single process to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests, and thus it solves the classic c10k problem. All other web frameworks will break down and cry if you ask them to process more than a few dozen simultaneous requests on a single machine. Chicago Boss is built with Erlang, the same platform used by banks and telecoms to achieve unprecendented scalability and (no exaggeration) 99.9999999% reliability.

Oh my

gloob2• 17 years ago

It reminds me of those Powerthirst videos on YouTube.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

it solves the classic c10k problem.

Of course, this is the problem you get once you've solved the hard problems already, which is how to get that many visitors in the first place. At this point you have the money to buy a bunch of servers, typically, so this is aimed at people who are really great at getting incredible numbers of hits, but really poor at monetizing them.

mononcqc• 17 years ago

The Nine nines of reliability often quoted is for the availability of a complete distributed system, including maintenance downtime.

A typical single Ericsson AXD 301 switch had a target of 5 nines of reliability without network redundancy, which is 5mins/year, including planned outages. see http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf

One of the advantages of these switches was that they could manage 95% throughput at 150% load (Throughput then drops linearly to 40% at 1000% sustained load), which is also extremely useful, although not mentioned often.

tibbon• 17 years ago

I dunno, I'm pretty interested in playing with it. I'm a little cautious of trashing this based on the claims so far without seeing where it goes. Anyone remember the iPod thread on Slashdot that declared it as a useless product that would never take off? For all I know there was a similar one about Rails.

It does make some big claims, but I've been looking for a reason to mess with Erlang for a while and this seems pretty neat.

jobeirne• 17 years ago

Such a great pitch for a web framework.

paulsmith• 17 years ago

This is by Evan Miller, whom this crowd may know from what was once titled the "Balls Out Guide to Nginx Module Development":

http://www.evanmiller.org/nginx-modules-guide.html

jhancock5• 17 years ago

Here's a few things I experienced when building an erlang webapp 4 years ago:

During dev, I had a server live for users to play with. The data structures were in flux, there was zero traditional data input protection. My users were domain experts, no tech background and would type in all sorts of odd inputs as there was no training or documentation on how to use the webapp. But I never once had data corruption issues and never once did the server crash. I was able to run this "test" server with no admin or headaches while I was doing dev.

The reasons are due to a few characteristics of erlang:

1 - you write concrete pattern matching, not abstract object containers. So a controller or model function would spec out a clear data structure that was expected as input. Anything else failed right at the point where the data didn't fit the patterns and guards.

2 - each request is handled by an isolated erlang process that fails gracefully and doesn't effect the rest of the system. So my early testers would get error dumps from the server for bad data inputs but they never corrupted the data or crashed things. I was able to take these error messages from test users to see how they were using the system incorrectly.

3 - Single assignment and functional programming were a big win in terms of writing once, testing once (not writing separate test code), and knowing that that piece of code was solid and I could move on.

The app was very responsive. All requests were ajax and this system felt like the server was running on the same box as the web browser. When we had errors, the erlang error message almost always showed the crash at exactly the point in the code that needed attention.

These characteristics speak to the power of the dev process, not scalability which is what you normally hear about erlang.

icey4• 17 years ago

What do you work with now? If it's not erlang, what prompted you to not use erlang?

jhancock5• 17 years ago

That's a good question. I've been using merb lately. I started with rails and didn't like it but thought ruby was ok. The main reason for going with ruby was to be able to hire other programmers and get out of the way of coding everything myself. I assumed 3 years ago when I made the decision that I would eventually be able to hire others. This has not worked out as planned. I am still coding everything. It turns out erlang has taken off enough that it may be reasonable to do a new project in erlang. I'm still not a fan of using erlang for writing view templates, but choices for this have improved greatly as well. When viewing the erlang vs. ruby programmer talent pool, there is a gut feel that the erlang pool may have a higher quality ratio although its a much smaller pool.

I can tell you that although merb is a nice framework, I still end up digging through code at times to find bugs that would be much easier to spot if it were in erlang.

gtani2• 17 years ago

The language and development tools have exploded the last 4 years, both inside and outside Ericsson and especially after Armstrong's book and work on R12 started. I have a blog post brewing on all the improvements, here's an outline

===================

string, regex handlers, faster file I/O:

- "re" module replaces "regex"

- faster iteration over large binaries, R13A

- avoid io:get_line using raw access

-----------------------------

metaprogramming/"DSL"

- deep exploring parse_transform

----------------------

frameworks, database, middleware

- couchdb, nitrogen, mochiweb, erlyweb,and now the boss!

- thrift, ejabberd, rabbitMQ,

----------------------------

debug, trace, static code analysis; verify program behavior

- dialyzer, tidier (Sagonas and Avgerinos)

- mcErlang model checker

- quick check application vs. specification

-------------------------

data structures

- destructive / mutable byte arrays (HiPE BIF)

- shared immutable data structure

----------------------

tail recursion

- Ericsson expanding as fast as they can (e.g. "andalso",

-------------

SMP, run queues,

----------

build systems, distribute your app

- rake - faxien, sinan (erlware)

==============

Yah, this could be a long post, take a while to draft too.

Dunno the state of scala, clojure and haskell /GHC docs these days, but to explore the dark corners of erlang dev, you ahve to do a lot of mailing list and google digging.

(and read Cesarini/Thompson book, which is equal to best software books ever, modulo fair number of typo's)

signa11• 17 years ago

would you mind sharing your blog address ? i tried looking for it in your profile, but couldn't really find any pointers to it. thanks !

jacquesm• 17 years ago

In less than 20 lines you've just converted me from a fence-sitter to someone that is going to install erlang and mess around with it.

Thanks!

ktharavaad• 17 years ago

>>>Chicago Boss is fully asynchronous, using one single process to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests<<<

>>>All other web frameworks will break down and cry if you ask them to process more than a few dozen simultaneous requests on a single machine.<<<<

Isn't this what facebook Tornado, Orbited and all the other servers using select()/epoll() solves?

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

Sure, but they aren't using Erlang.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Erlang's whole I/O and scheduling model is optimized for this design in a way that Python's simply isn't.

jrbedard• 17 years ago

Sounds like a good project! is the name an americanized version of "Tokyo Tyrant"?

zvikara• 17 years ago

I can't wait working with "Chicago Boss" web framework with the upcoming "London Queen" Ajax framework and "Moscow Oligarch" distributed SCM.

stevejohnson• 17 years ago

It needs a "Chicago Closet" to go with it.

ams6110• 17 years ago

Capone's Vault.

saurabh2• 17 years ago

This website's is a wreckage in IE8, just so you know.

anamax3• 17 years ago

With IE7, the site is basically empty. There's nothing after the line with the links to api, .... download on any of the pages.

alnayyir3• 17 years ago

Site wasn't made for IE users, it was made for developers.

juvenn• 17 years ago

I'd like trying this to fine-grain my Erlang skills.

joshu• 17 years ago

Are Django Templates really that worthwhile to be compatible with? They seem quite annoying to me...

mitko• 17 years ago

a.k.a. Al Capone

iamaleksey• 17 years ago

Having worked on several Rails projects and now working on a large erlang application, I'm not sure that bringing Rails idioms to erlang is a good or desirable thing.

I also find it somewhat funny that it includes an ActiveRecord port - an object-relational mapper in a functional language to talk to a non-relational backend (tokyo tyrant).

Rails Idioms + Django Templates + Erlang Power = Chicago Boss

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