

Zotonic - A High Performance Web Framework in Erlang - deathtrader666
http://aosabook.org/en/posa/zotonic.html

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bdg
I spent the week before the holidays playing with zotonic. It's quite
impressive and in my humble opinion blows away what wordpress does. Once the
community levels up I'm sure it will give all other cms platforms a run for
their money.

The features are impressive, but the requirements for the lowest-common-
denominator (strictly regarding code-savy-skills) consumer of a cms might be a
bit higher than they can deal with.

I've never used erlang before that, and have a heavy exposure to php and js
recently. I did not have extreme trouble getting basic things working. Small
things like syntax were the hardest part.

That being said, this really blurs the line between framework and cms. If
anything, this is a framework specifically for a cms. It looks like it's
light-weight enough that it could be grown into other uses, but for that I'm
leaning towards ChicagoBoss.

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adamors
> blows away what wordpress does

Wordpress is top dog because it's easy like copy-paste, not because it's
particularly powerful. Probably every other PHP CMS blows away Wordpress in
terms of features, but they all add a degree of complexity.

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Communitivity
I use this for my blog site. It is an awesome Content Management System (I
wouldn't call it a Web framework). It has some caveats but is as good as
Django in my opinion.

~~~
itp
They call themselves a framework, though, not a CMS. And you've compared it to
Django, which really is a framework, not a CMS. What part of Django would you
say it is most directly comparable to?

~~~
xaritas
The most striking similarity is the template syntax, it uses an Erlang
implementation of Django templates. I think it draws some inspiration from
Django's "batteries included" philosophy in a couple of ways. It encourages
developing with small re-usable modules, like contact forms or blogs, that
might be considered similar to the Django apps philosophy. It has an
automatically generated admin area for your content/models, but it doesn't
have a strong notion of model fields so you might have to do more admin view
development (HTML/CSS/JS). It has an opinionated data and deeply integrated
data model abstraction, although not being relational it isn't at all similar
to Django's ORM.

In Zotonic a single Erlang VM hosts multiple sites (equivalent to Django
projects), which can be nice for certain uses. Like most Erlang frameworks it
is a little better at handling concurrency and AJAX-y ("realtime") websites
than some of the more popular web frameworks, to support this the template
language is extended to allow wiring UI elements to controllers without
explicitly writing the JavaScript.

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joeevans
We live in amazing times where a framework/tool/hybrid like this pops up as
complete as it is, with the sort of instructions for installation that used to
take a year to appear.

I'm going to get it installed, just to celebrate that!

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d9k
It's my first commend at ycombinator and I want to say: Hacker News, I love
you! ^^

I tried to install Erlang IDEs such as Erlide (
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotonic-
users/CdLhhQ...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotonic-
users/CdLhhQdXKSY) ) and open Zotonic projects but features like code
completion and quick reference didn't work. Maybe some folder access rights
problems, I don't know.

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hamzakc
This looks really interesting. A very well laid out description of the reasons
behind the core decisions made.

Any plans on supporting elixir ? The syntax seems much nicer then plain old
Erlang.

~~~
wcummings
They're totally interchangeable so there's no reason you couldn't, maybe with
no modifications. It's not uncommon to see a mix of Erlang and LFE (lisp
flavored Erlang) or elixir when they're well suited (usually for meta
programming features to eliminate repetitive Erlang.

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danjaouen
I would pay a lot for a Rails-like framework written in Erlang. Erlang really
hits a sweet spot between performance and developer-friendliness.

~~~
deathtrader666
You're in luck!

Check out ChicagoBoss, another Erlang web framework which claims to follow the
Rails-like MVC pattern closely.

[http://www.chicagoboss.org/](http://www.chicagoboss.org/)

~~~
jbeja
Is not compatible with Erlang R16B03

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yashshah
Amazing blog. I had also tried Zotonic and was impressed by the performance.

This should work great in Indian market.

~~~
Ixiaus
I'm not being combative here, but I'm curious why you said "This should work
great in Indian market."

~~~
mnbvcxza
Because he is from Brazil.

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joeevans
wow... integrated OAuth and ACL to the site or database... and code hot swaps
while the site is running...

