Building Web Applications with Erlang: Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws

by Zachary Kessin

Overview

Why choose Erlang for web applications? Discover the answer hands-on by building a simple web service with this book. If you’re an experienced web developer who knows basic Erlang, you’ll learn how to work with REST, dynamic content, web sockets, and concurrency through several examples. In the process, you’ll see first-hand that Erlang is ideal for building business-critical services.

Erlang was designed for fault-tolerant, non-stop telecom systems, and building applications with it requires a large set of skills. By the end of the book, you’ll have the information you need to build a basic web service and get it running.

• Explore the power of Erlang and REST for building web services
• Serve static and dynamic content with the Yaws web server
• Use different methods for outputting data to user, such as encoding Erlang data structures into JSON or XML
• Build an application to listen for HTTP requests, process them, store data, and return useful data
• Go beyond the request-response model—push data to clients with web sockets
• Use Erlang and Yaws to stream data from the server to a client

"A book which is truly needed and will help get Erlang to the next level."

—Francesco Cesarini, CEO of Erlang Solutions, author of Erlang Programming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449320652
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Zachary Kessin has been working on developing interactive web applications since 1994. In the last few years Zachary's focus has been on building complex applications in the browser with Javascript, browser-based testing with Selenium, functional programming, and code generation.

Table of Contents

Preface; Who This Book Is For; Learning Erlang; Before You Start; What You Will Learn; The Limits of This Book; Help! It Doesn’t Compile or Run!; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Building Scalable Systems with Erlang and REST; 1.1 Why Erlang?; 1.2 Why Web Services? Why REST?; 1.3 New Opportunities for Scaling and Resilience; Chapter 2: Getting Started with Yaws; 2.1 Working with Yaws; 2.2 Dynamic Content in Yaws; 2.3 Templates; 2.4 Logging; Chapter 3: Appmods: Dynamic Content in Yaws; 3.1 Appmod Configuration; 3.2 When the URI Does Not Correspond to a File; 3.3 Cookies; 3.4 Session Handling; 3.5 Access Control; 3.6 Interacting with Erlang Services and Business Logic Layers; Chapter 4: Implementing REST; 4.1 Decoding a Request; 4.2 Response and Headers; 4.3 Building the Response; 4.4 Responding to the REST Request; 4.5 A Full Example; Chapter 5: File Upload; 5.1 The File Upload Request; 5.2 Saving to Disk; 5.3 Putting It All Together; 5.4 Storage in a Distributed System; 5.5 Saving to Amazon S3; Chapter 6: WebSockets; 6.1 The WebSocket Request; 6.2 Basic WebSocket Handler; 6.3 Advanced WebSocket Handler; Chapter 7: Streaming; 7.1 Simple Streaming; Chapter 8: Using the HTTP Client; 8.1 Making a Request; 8.2 Using OAuth; Chapter 9: Building an Application with OTP; 9.1 Directory Structure; 9.2 Building an Application Server; 9.3 The Generic Server; 9.4 The Multicast Server; 9.5 Interfacing the Server with the Web; 9.6 Some Client-Side Code; 9.7 Let’s Have Some Adult Supervision Around Here!; 9.8 A Little Optimization; 9.9 Bundling as an Application; 9.10 The App File; 9.11 Wrapping Up OTP; Installing Erlang and Yaws; Beyond Yaws; Web Servers; Web Frameworks; Interfacing with Ruby and Python; Ruby; Python; Using Erlang with Emacs; Distel; Flymake Mode; Gen Server Template;