I'm excited to share Nova, a new web framework built for Erlang, designed to make web development in Erlang simpler, faster, and more approachable. Nova leverages Erlang's concurrency, reliability, and scalability to create a robust yet lightweight framework for building modern web applications.
Key features:
* Lightweight and modular: Easy to integrate with existing Erlang projects.
* Built for concurrency: Harnesses Erlang's actor model for high-performance web apps.
* Developer-friendly: Simplifies routing, middleware, and template handling.
* Extensible: Supports plugins and custom integrations.
Check it out: GitHub: https://github.com/novaframework/nova Homepage: https://novaframework.org Getting Started Guide: https://dev.to/taure/getting-started-with-nova-1ioo/stats
We’re early in development and would love feedback from the community! If you’re an Erlang enthusiast or curious about building web apps with a language known for its reliability (think WhatsApp or RabbitMQ), give Nova a spin and let us know your thoughts.
What do you think about using Erlang for web development? Any features you’d love to see in a framework like this?
azaras•6mo ago
colecut•6mo ago
cmdrk•6mo ago
taure•6mo ago
This is more to have a smooth web framework similar to Phoenix but for Erlang.
You can also use Nova for elixir.
johnnyjeans•6mo ago
asa400•6mo ago
Why someone might like Elixir:
For me, I love the clarity and brevity of Erlang the language but I find Elixir a lot more pleasant to use day-to-day. This is just personal, I am not making a general statement saying Elixir is better.> Last I checked, the debugging experience with elixir was pretty subpar.
Just curious, why is this? All of the Erlang debugging stuff seems to work.
klibertp•6mo ago
But you'd see a decompiled Erlang-ish code in the (WX-based, graphical) debugger, no? Genuinely curious, I think it was like that last I checked, but that was in 2019.
klibertp•6mo ago
Easy:
(Assuming you're not trolling: you chose to focus on features that can only be judged subjectively, and therefore can only be discussed as preferences. It's ok to have them, but actively displaying them is a bit pointless. Objectively measurable features of both languages put them very close together, with both having slight advantages over the other in different areas, on average making them almost equivalent. Especially compared to anything non-BEAM.)johnnyjeans•6mo ago
asa400•6mo ago
Whereas writing the same thing in Elixir would look like:
This is because Elixir allows `x` to be rebound, in effect changing what data `x` points to, but not mutating the underlying data itself. Under the hood Elixir rewrites each expression into something resembling the Erlang version.The practical effect of this is that if you for example insert a process spawn somewhere in between any of the lines that references `x`, that process gets its own totally immutable version of the data that `x` points to at that point in time. This applies in both Erlang and Elixir, as data in both is completely immutable.
johnnyjeans•6mo ago
State variables are what I think corpos call a "code smell". The BEAM/OTP isn't a number cruncher, there are better tools out there if you're doing a lot of that. Erlang is, at it's core, about constraint logic programming. It should be best thought as a tool for granular, scalable, distributable userspace scheduling. If you need something outside of that, NIFs or Ports. Both are quite nice.
asa400•6mo ago
This kind of process and function-local static single-assignment code is all over the place in Erlang codebases. It's incredibly common. The other popular method is tail recursion.
I searched for literally 30 seconds and found these:
klibertp•6mo ago
It's not about the state but about intermediate results. When you have a value that you pass to one function, and then you need to pass the result to another function, you're not dealing with a "state" as OTP defines it, unless the calls are asynchronous. Often, they're not, and that's where variable rebinding comes in.
Worth noting: `|>` macro operator in Elixir serves a similar purpose, as long as you don't need pattern matching between calls. In that case, you don't have to name intermediate results at all, resulting in cleaner code.
> State variables are what I think corpos call a "code smell".
Having to call multiple functions in a sequence is the most natural thing to do, and Erlang code is littered with "X1 = ..., X2 = ...(X1), X3 = ...(X2)" kind of code everywhere.
schonfinkel•6mo ago
Also, the latest versions of OTP have introduced the `maybe` expression: https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0049
klibertp•6mo ago
I know there are monad libraries using parse transforms and/or list comprehensions, but I often found their use is frowned upon in the Erlang community. I kind of assumed the GP in this thread would reject them, given their negative opinion on macros.
schonfinkel•6mo ago