Steve Vinoski's Blog

Stefan Tilkov already blogged about this, but he and I co-authored an article about node.js for my Nov/Dec “Functional Web” column. Node.js is indeed very cool with surprisingly good performance, and it was really nice to finally get to write something together with Stefan (I wrote the foreword for his book, REST und HTTP (German), but that’s not quite the same as co-authoring).

For the September/October issue of “The Functional Web” I’m lucky enough to have master programmer, top-notch trainer, and wonderful conference speaker Glenn Vanderburg as my guest author. Here, Glenn covers the Fleet and Enlive templating libraries for Clojure as a follow-up to Aaron Bedra’s Jul/Aug Compojure article.

“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.

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.