
Zotonic: An Erlang Web Framework - brudgers
http://zotonic.com/
======
kiwee
Having worked with Erlang for few years. I still don't understand the new hype
behind it. Ok, the Beam VM have a lot of good ideas. But I think that API of
OTP and the language itself do not help to make concise and maintainable code.
And you're pretty much on your own about tooling. I really think that even if
you can achieve good performance/scalability in theory, in practice your team
become less productive.

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pmontra
I think it's about Elixir. Personally I won't start a web project with Erlang:
it's too hard to read and to write, it makes me feel like I'm still in the 80s
(it's when I started coding.) Elixir is almost 1:1 with Erlang and I'm much
more comfortable with it.

I can't say much about tooling because I never really worked with Erlang, only
some toy programs. Elixir's tooling seems to be on par with what I'm using for
Ruby, JavaScript and Python.

~~~
dnautics
It's better than those. I can write an integraion test that leaves the vm via
http request a comes back in and the http handler only views a shard of the
shared state of the system associated with that particular test. That's a
concurrent integration test. You can't really do that reliably without the
BEAM.

Thanks to Elixirs macros, the code for this subsystem is about 75 lines of
code and in order to use it in a group of tests it's a single "use" statement
at the head of the test, and the hooks inside of the main part of the code are
compiled to no-ops in prod.

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icedchocolate
Why do people program new projects in Erlang as opposed to Elixir? Especially
when it’s a web project and Elixir has Phoenix?

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caiocaiocaio
I really love Elixir as a language. Phoenix looks nice from a distance, but I
found it to be very ugly and messy when you get down to the nitty-gritty. I
wrote a personal project in Phoenix but I'm thinking of translating it,
because I really want to wash my hands of that framework forever.

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conradfr
What don't you like that is specific to Phoenix?

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caiocaiocaio
Just the general feeling of having to constantly dig through the documentation
trying to suss out unintuitive things that would be easy in other frameworks.
And poor (imo) naming conventions. And a lot of other little annoyances. No
one specific thing as much the feeling of death by a thousands cuts.

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minieggs
Loved the intro video. Perfect amount of odd.

~~~
xyproto
Watching this video about composing corporate music made watching the intro
video extra fun:

[https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI](https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI)

I also like the old telephone, which I believe is a reference to one of the
old introductory videos to Erlang.

~~~
esquire_900
This quickly draws away from the original subject, but this video is awesome.
It directly points to some of the causes that make modern and corporate life
so dull and lame.

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bdibs
Looks interesting, since it seems to focus on performance, are there any
benchmarks compared to Phoenix/Elixir?

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schwartzworld
> You can't disable jQuery. Zotonic will not work without it. Sorry... :-)

I don't want to get into the same old argument about using jquery in 2019, but
yikes. There are certain kinds of frontends that are a nightmare to build in
jQuery

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yumraj
Is this more of a CMS or a full MVC Web framework?

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SkyMarshal
CMS.

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mmzeeman
It is more like a web-framework with a built in CMS.

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cjohnson318
demo.zotonic.com refused to connect

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robbya
Unfortunate. They have a list of sites that use zotonic, which may help. I
thought this one was impressive:

[https://verafin.com/](https://verafin.com/)

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codyb
I wonder if it’s still using Zotonic, none of their software engineering
careers mention Erlang at all.

Lots of Java, JavaScript, AWS, Linux, etc.

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esdott
It looks to be using Wordpress (at least for the front end code, and why would
you only use WP for that?). I see lots of references to Visual Composer.

