Steve Vinoski's Blog » functional programming

New Column on Webmachine

steve — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:19:06 +0000

“The Functional Web” column is finally back, this time with a column about Webmachine co-authored with Justin Sheehy. The column title is Developing RESTful Web Services with Webmachine, and you can follow that link to retrieve the PDF.

Webmachine is a highly innovative web application framework, and it can teach you a great deal about the specifics of HTTP and the details of REST. It’s also written in Erlang, which continues to be my favorite programming language of all time because of its incredible practicality, utility, and elegance.

My column hiatus was due to extreme startup workload, which for better or worse is showing no sign of letting up anytime soon. But it’s nice to get the column back on track for the March/April Internet Computing issue, and one of my goals is to avoid missing any more issues this year. Many thanks to Justin for his contribution to this issue of the column.

New Column: Build Your Next Web App with Erlang

steve — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:12:10 +0000

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 Podcast

steve — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:49:31 +0000

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

New Functional Web Podcast

steve — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:39:35 +0000

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.

New “Functional Web” column: Scala and Lift

steve — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:58:24 +0000

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.