Is Erlang ready for business applications?

Question

I would really like to know about support for the following in Erlang.

1. Support for Windows COM. COM support in itself covers all requirements regarding accessing Access, Excel and Word documents. Both read and write.

2. PDF generation and printing. Note printing is easy if it can be done on a Windows printer server. And many printers don't have any driver beside Windows.

3. And a good database support which doesn't make any task harder than doing it on a SQL server. Erlang Mnesia is OK, given that there is nothing harder to perform on Mnesia than on any SQL server.

The business app that I am planning to port will be web based. It will be nice if I could port it to GUI later, but asking for that might be too much for Erlang, I guess. I am OK with that.

Edit: I would like to add that support for MS-Office is not that a big deal. A language only needs to support COM. And the whole microsoft world will be at your door step. Even Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby has COM support. Though none of those languages were born for the Windows world.

Answer 1

Even if I'm a great Erlang/OTP fan currently developing my application server (http://code.google.com/p/tideland-eas/) in Erlang I think it's not the right tool for you. Erlang is brilliant in the domain of concurrency, distribution, and reliability. But you need a tough integration into the Microsoft world. So maybe you should take a look at F# to get at least a kind of Erlang feeling here.

Answer 2

1. If you want COM support you better work with more microsoft-friendly language
2. The same
3. The same, but erlang has ODBC interface that allows you to work with 'ordinary' SQL-servers. I know it can mysql, not sure for mssql

Anyway you should think about some helping applications like 'print_pdf.exe', 'change_word.exe' that would be managed by erlang system, but not one erlang application which doing everything. Please read about C Nodes and Erlang FAQ's question "What sort of applications is Erlang particularly suitable for?"

-- sorry my English )