Javascript

Why Cowboy and Batman.js There are a lot of Erlang web frameworks out there today. Not all are modeled after the MVC model (see Nitrogen), but I think all of them are addressing the problem the wrong way. I recently gave a presentation, slides here and the code for this example here, describing my perferred method for using Erlang for web development and why I think it is the best way to go. ...

I’ll have a complete walk of through using Cowboy and Batman.js to build the TodoMVC clone in a few days. For now I have the slides from my talk at the Chicago Erlang User Group: Chicago Erlang User Group April, 4th 2012 I couldn’t get iframe embedding to work with Wordpress… So if anyone knows what that is up with please comment.

This will be a two part series of posts on writing plugins for Opa. One of Opa’s greatest features is you write everything in the functional, staticly typed Opa language. This even includes the frontend code you’d usually do in Javascript. This means your code is less error-prone which significantly reduces the amount of time spent on debugging code. But how do you use Javascript library X within your Opa code? ...

I decided I wanted to add Google Analytics to OpaDo but had no idea how to easily tell each page to include the necessary Javascript. I asked on the Opa mailing list and got a quick and simple response. Frederic Ye pointed me to Resource.register_external_js It couldn’t have been any easier. You simply place your google_analytics.js file in your project and use the Resource.register_external_js function to modify the default customization of all Resources. ...

Edit: I just learned that dotcloud supports Opa! So I’ve pushed OpaDo and you can see a demo here http://opado-tristan.sloughter.dotcloud.com/ I wanted something quick and simple to do in Opa to give it a try so I decided to implement the TodoMVC example that has been redone in almost all Javascript frameworks, https://github.com/addyosmani/todomvc. The code can be found on GitHub here: https://github.com/tsloughter/OpaDo Opa is unique in that it is not only a new language but also a new web server and database. ...

The following is NOT a tutorial for either Batman.js or Knockout.js. But, it is instead a sort of side-by-side comparison of the two for creating a user creation form that POSTs the new user’s data as JSON to the backend. The method of web development I’ve come to find the best is based on heavy frontend Javascript (though written in Coffeescript) communicating with a backend via a RESTful interface. This is appealing, because you are not cluttering the application logic with view related code. ...

To experiment with using a pure client-side rendering talking to an Erlang backend I’ve taken James Yu’s CloudEdit tutorial an app written with Backbone.js and Rails and converted the backend to use Webmachine and CouchDB. You can see eCloudEdit in action here. The Backbone.js code is the same so to understand that please see James' post, here I’ll describe the Erlang backend. To begin with we setup two applications, one for handling the web interaction and a second for handling the database interaction. ...