Steve Vinoski’s Blog

The latest “Functional Web” column is now available. It’s entitled “Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang,” (PDF) and my co-author this time was Dave Bryson of BeepBeep fame. Over the past year or two there’s been a sharp increase in development efforts in the Erlang web framework space, as a number of folks, ourselves included, have found that Erlang works really well for server-side web development. In this column Dave and I provide an introduction to a number of Erlang web frameworks and servers. Future columns will dig into some of these in much more detail.

My thanks to Dave for his efforts on this column; he was a sheer pleasure to work with. If Dave ever invites you to co-author something, whether it’s an article or some code, I recommend you take him up on his offer.

P.S. Sorry for the quiet blog lately — it’s just that I have a whole lot of work on my plate these days.

“Scala and Lift — Functional Recipes for the Web” (PDF) co-authored with Debasish Ghosh, is now also available as a podcast.

IEEE Computing Now is now featuring a new podcast of my first Functional Web column from the March/April issue of Internet Computing. That was the first issue of this new column, so it’s an introduction to the main topic of the column and what future editions will cover. It describes why I think functional programming languages are making a comeback, briefly compares them to current popular languages, explains why I believe they work well for web development, and describes some of the technologies and ideas future columns will explore.

The May/June issue of my Internet Computing column, “The Functional Web,” is now available. This one’s called “Scala and Lift — Functional Recipes for the Web” (PDF) and I had the great fortune of writing it together with Debasish Ghosh.

I’ve admired Debasish’s blog for awhile now, as he’s always exploring interesting angles and features of different functional programming languages and techniques. I emailed Debasish completely out of the blue and asked if he’d be interested in writing something together, and he jumped right in.

If you ever get a chance to work with Debasish, I highly encourage it. He made the whole task quite easy because he cranked out the first draft so quickly, and as we iteratively edited the column, he turned each draft around literally overnight. He and I live on opposite sides of the world, which worked out well because it allowed one of us to write and edit while the other slept. Meeting deadlines is key to delivering this column on time for each issue of IC, and so I really appreciated Debasish’s attention to our schedule. The fact that he writes well, as you can see in his blog, didn’t hurt at all either. :-)

Given their collective richness, it’s hard to cover both Scala and Lift in a single column, but I think we managed to describe the important issues and features. As always, if you have any feedback on this column, post it here in a comment or email me.

A couple months ago I wrote that my Internet Computing column, “Toward Integration,” was going to end. Indeed it did, but I’m very pleased to report that I’ve replaced it with a whole new column entitled “The Functional Web.”

The inaugural column is imaginatively titled “Welcome to ‘The Functional Web’” and it provides the background for what I plan to cover in the column going forward. All signs indicate that functional languages are garnering significant interest these days. At QCon last week, for example, it seemed like everyone was talking about them, and Real World Haskell didn’t just win a Jolt Award for nothing. Most of my work these days involves web development with Erlang, and given my general interest in functional programming, the combination of these two areas seemed like the perfect direction for a new column.

If you’re a functional programmer working in the web space and have a knack for writing, drop me an email. If you’ve got a good proposal, I’d be happy to either co-author something with you or have you serve as a guest columnist for an issue.

Finally, I’d like to thank the readers of “Toward Integration” very much for sticking with me for the past seven years. That’s a long time, but rest assured your many positive comments and your feedback kept me going — I deeply appreciate it. I really hope you’ll join me for “The Functional Web” and that you’ll keep that excellent feedback coming — it’s going to be interesting and I guarantee we’re all going to learn a few things along the way.