Hello everyone!
I am currently learning Erlang
Can SO users give interesting examples of any of their Erlang application deployments?
I want to gain some insight into common Erlang uses past telecomms, and any problems or unexpected benefits Erlang brought during development/deployment.
I hope this will give some broader context and whet the whistle for myself and anyone else jumping into Erlang!
Thanks in advance!
Our first application was a web/sms social network and I wrote a long paper on the subject which can be read here.
Get to know the the release tools erlang/OTP already provides.
Erlang bootscripts are wonderful for ensuring that all the running applications needed are present and of the correct version. Working within the OTP framework for releases will be much easier than trying to invent your own. Erlang has lots of tools for making sure deployments can be done both live and without breaking running services. The language and runtime are designed for this so they've done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I've found the tools useful even for small "non-enterprise" apps and deployments.
Who uses Erlang for product development:
We've built a web app based on an Erlang backend.
Erlang is in charge of the business logic, the security and data store.
The browser communicates exclusively through JSON services with it and do the rendering.
It will be in beta soon, and to give you an idea of the app there is a video here
There are as well some resources here and here about what we learned along the way.
Of course there's always applications like wings3D which is for 3D modelling. It's not exactly a "deployment", because these sorts of programs are used anywhere from individuals to teams of artists in their pipeline. There are other projects for things like simulation, but I'm not sure how many companies are publicly stating that they use Erlang. As for me, I'm planning to adopt it for my company for industrial automation.