Zotonic: Erlang Web Framework and Performance | Hacker News Reader

Zotonic: Erlang Web Framework and Performance

zotonic.com

57 pointsareski8 comments

From the website:

  Zotonic’s data model can be seen as a pragmatic 
  implementation of the Semantic Web: a mixture between
  a traditional database and a triple store.

I can imagine how to create a CRUD-like webapp with simple mapping DB tables to business objects, but have no experience with triple store.

It would be great to see more sample applications made with zotonic. Not only a cms (simple blog comes pre-installed), but something involving user interaction (an issue tracker, or a HN clone).

Also, at the moment zotonic looks a bit like Zope (everything should be created through backend web forms). I am most likely wrong, but a sample app could demonstrate a workflow that a developer should use.

It's a great framework, quite eager to learn how to use it properly.

Zotonic is not really like Zope: we like developers to be in control of their source code, so stuff like editing templates or code on the web / storing code in the db is not supported and never will be.

Normally, every site that runs in zotonic sits in its own git repository. You can even hook up a webhook to automatically update your site on the fly (hot code reloading, http://modules.zotonic.com/page/367/mod-github)

For a very simple example site you could look a this image pasting service that I whipped up: http://stick.im/ . its code is also on github, https://github.com/arjan/stick.im

It looks pretty cool, but maybe a bit tipped towards the 'CMS' side of things compared with, say, Chicago Boss, which I am currently using for a project and enjoying. Has anyone out there used both?

When I reached the slide listing "what's in the box" I realized that why they call it a web framework rather than a web application framework. I never heard of the web framework concept, it seems that it's might be somewhere between a CMS framework and a web app framework.

I haven't watched the video yet but I have read through the slides and found them to be rather honest. I really do enjoy presentations where the tradeoffs for using a technology are well displayed rather than disguised in other forms.

thanks :-)

I was recently checking out Zotonic and asking questions on the #zotonic Freenode IRC channel. Very helpful people on the IRC (which seems to be bridged to some other channel thru a bot).

If you are coming from MVC frameworks in other languages, Erlang and Zotonic will take you by surprise. There's some learning to do though.

Some really good videos on Erlang for the curious - www.youtube.com/user/ErlangSolutions.

I am happy to see the speaker cites our project [1], although I've only seen the slides and not yet listened to the presentation. Not sure if he talks about it in a positive or dismissive light. :)

Edit: It's partially dismissive in tone, but so be it.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

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