Chicago Erlang Users - June 2014

SimpleBridge - Build Web Apps with on Any Erlang Server

by Jesse Gumm

There are a lot of Erlang webservers (Cowboy, Elli, Inets, Mochiweb, Webmachine, Yaws). How do you decide which server to use? I say: don't decide right away - build it with SimpleBridge first, which provides a consistent API to to them all. In this talk, I'll show you how to build an ultra-simple web application on top of SimpleBridge using Inets, Erlang's built-in webserver, and then demonstrate migrating that application from Inets to Yaws. I'll also show you how SimpleBridge can provide websocket capabilities onto any Erlang webserver, even those that don't natively support Websockets.

Refactoring Imperative Code In Erlang

by Everyone - It's Hands On Coding!

We'll take the second half of the night to break out our editors and erlc to work on a very simple but extremely fun exercise - rewriting a block of imperative code in Erlang! Maybe this sounds basic, but don't be fooled - you'll see some pretty amazing things in the effort to move from "telling the computer what to do" to "representing what's happening". This is a great way to learn some Erlang and maybe a new way of approaching computing problems.