Erlang Solutions Newsletter 18th January 2010


Contents

  • Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010
  • QCON 2010
  • ACCU 2010
  • Hypernumbers
  • Erlang Courses
  • NKtalk
  • Erlang News
  • Tutorial by Francesco Cesarini

Registration is Now Open for the Erlang Factory San Francisco Bay Area 2010!
Register now and save $400!

The registration for the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010 is now open! Register before the 31st January 2010 and save USD400 by taking advantage of the Very-Early Bird offer! You can register now by clicking here .

The Erlang Factory conference will last two days from 25 to 26 March 2010 . There will be over 35 talks in 6 separate tracks. Delegates can choose which talks they want to attend and move freely among the tracks. Among our first confirmed speakers for the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area are Joe Armstrong – father of Erlang, Alexis Richardson (AMQP Expert and CEO at RabbitMQ), Steve Vinoski (Yaws committer, REST advocate, and distributed systems expert), Kenneth Lundin , manager of the Erlang/OTP development team and Kresten Krab Thorup (CTO of Trifork and Creator of Erjang), to mention but a few. The full list of speakers is available here .

In addition to the conference, there will be a three day Erlang University , allowing you to learn Erlang from the experts. You can attend the Erlang Express course, taught by O’Reilly Erlang Programming author Simon Thompson. Experienced users can attend the OTP Express course, taught by Erlang Solutions’ Training Manager Henry Nystrom, or Kevin Smith’s Web Programming with Erlang . A 3-day introduction to Quick Check   will also be given by John Hughes and Thomas Arts of QuviQ. By following three days of training in Erlang with two days of conference talks and networking, you will benefit far more than by only having the training by itself.

The conference and university will be held in the San Francisco Airport Hilton hotel, a 5-minute shuttle bus ride from the BART and SFO Airport. We have negotiated great conference rates! For rooms with either 2 double-beds or a Kingsize bed, delegates will pay only $109.00 per night – room only, with FREE PARKING and FREE WI-FI . This hotel has been recently completely upgraded and all the rooms revamped. You will shortly be able to make bookings directly with the Hilton to take advantage of this great price - watch the Factory website for more information.
 
Last year over 120 delegates and speakers attended the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2009 . A total of 35 talks were delivered by 38 speakers in two days. Joe Armstrong describes these conferences as "explosions of enthusiasm. They have become the meeting place for people who want to build large scale systems that never stop" . If you want to see how the Erlang Factory looked last year, read the programme, download the presentation slides and watch the videos, you can do all that here .
 
Don't miss out  the largest gathering of Erlang Expertise in the USA and register today!

Erlang Blogs and News

Gert Meulyzer sums up the year 2009 after having tried six new programming languages (Common LISP, Haskell, Erlang, Scala, F# and OCaml).
So what do I not like about Erlang? I'm not sure. It's like it's so easy to use, the challenge of writing 'clever' code is gone. Haskell is too much of a challenge, it feels like Erlang is not enough of a challenge. I've written a couple of non-trivial things with Erlang, including a couple of web-apps with Yaws. No complaints, everything works like I want it to. But there was no challenge. This is a good thing of course, because the goal is to write stuff that you're going to use later on. Then why do I lack the feeling that I've accomplished something? I love doing things that are a little harder, but Erlang has a strange way of making almost everything easy. If I ever start a programming business, Erlang would be my language of choice.

Jack Moffitt has announced the release of Strophe.js 1.0 . Strophe.js is a JavaScript library for writing XMPP clients. It is used (with ejabberd on the server side) by e.g. www.chesspark.com and www.collecta.com , and featured in the book Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery . Jack Moffitt will be speaking at the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010 .

Kresten Krab Thorup, Trifork, has written a blog article about his lifelong quest to come to grips with concurrency modeling . Kresten is currently working on a hobby project, erjang , to make Erlang run on the JVM, and will speak at the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010 .

Shanda, a Chinese on-line game development company, has bought Mochi Media for 80 million USD . Mochi Media is a predominately erlang-based monetization business for on-line games. Congratulations to Bob Ippolito and the Mochi Media Team! We hope this is the first of many  successes in 2010.

Mustache is an Erlang port of the Ruby framework of the same name, originally written by Chris Wanstrath, one of the founders of GitHub.

The famous web site Reddit has moved to Amazon's EC2 Cloud to meet the ever-increasing demand, and recently released a new version of its software.
  But, to take full advantage of EC2's flexibility and to accommodate our rampant traffic growth of late, some overhauls were necessary. The most prominent change is that we've replaced our postgres-centric query queue with one that is centered around AMQP (specifically RabbitMQ), for much cleaner handling of asynchronous tasks.

Erlang-based RabbitMQ is delivering scalability to more and more sites on the Web. Another notable example is the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform , a shared platform and source repository for all NASA's researchers and developers.

LShift, the people behind the very popular messaging system RabbitMQ, has written a very interesting blog post about the recent improvements in the Erlang/OTP garbage collector: Next, I imposed a limit of about 200MB and did the same test. With R13B02, it got stuck after just over 260,000 messages: it was no longer able to reclaim any further space, and so flow-control kicked in and stopped the publisher, game over. With R13B03 it soldiered merrily on - I ended up manually killing it somewhere past the 1million message mark as I was getting bored.

Hypernumbers (London Erlang User Group Meeting)

We would like to invite you to our first London Erlang User Group meeting in 2010. This will take place on Tuesday, 19th January 2010 at 18:30 in the Erlang Solutions meeting room. The meeting will be dedicated to Hypernumbers with their CEO/CTO Gordon Guthrie as Speaker. Admission is free but advance registration is required. Refreshments will be served after the meeting.

Abstract: Hypernumbers is in the business of end-user computing on the web - providing the toolset for ordinary, non-technical users to ‘programme the internet’. The programming interface '’looks like a spreadsheet’ and the programme is bound to a standard web front-end with an intuitive GUI-builder.

Using it end users are able to:
* come to a website
* select a pre-built website template
* provision it on a cloud-based server
* customise it


This talk will look at some of the technical details of how it is implemented.


Erlang Courses

This is a preliminary schedule of our training courses. We plan to add more dates in South Africa, the US, Australia, the UK and Sweden. Don't hesitate to contact us  with suggestions of locations and dates! The complete list will be available in the next newsletter.

Krakow:

San Francisco:

Stockholm :

Johannesburg:

London:


Nasza Klasa launches NKtalk in cooperation with Erlang Solutions

Nasza Klasa (NK), Poland's biggest social networking site, with over 13 million active Users,  launches its new web-based IM service, called NKtalk with the help of Erlang Solutions Ltd.

When creating the NKtalk messenger service,  Nasza Klasa decided to use Erlang – the programming language increasingly used when creating  high-performance , distributed,  fault-tolerant systems such as those used in Instant Messaging. NK chose Erlang Solutions Ltd. as its development partner due to  their profound understanding of the Erlang language and their ability to solve complex technical issues.

Experts from Erlang Solutions provided Nasza Klasa's IT Team with professional training in the use of the Erlang language as well as the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (OTP) and Jabber/XMPP technologies. Erlang Solutions also implemented a large part of the system along with the integration of NKtalk with the nasza-klasa.pl portal and to scale the new system. Thanks to the Erlang technology NKtalk is now able to handle the huge traffic volume generated by users and their communication.

Erlang Solutions at QCon London 2010

This March Erlang Solutions Ltd. will be present at the fourth annual London enterprise software development conference - QCON 2010 . The event is designed for team leads, architects and project management. It gathers Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile, Erlang and architecture communities. QCON 2010 will be held in London from 8th till 12th March 2010.

On Friday, 12th March 2010 Ulf Wiger (our CTO) will be hosting the Concurrency Challenge track. He will also give an introductory talk The Concurrency Challenge at 10:20 and a presentation on Death by accidental complexity at  4:30 pm.We will also have our stand there!

Tutorials: March 8-9, 2010
Conference:  March 10-12, 2010

When registering for the QCon, use the Discount Code " erlangug " and save  £50 off the price!

ACCU 2010: Styling your Architecture in an Evolving Concurrent World and Message-Passing Concurrency in Erlang (Oxford, UK)

Meet us at ACCU 2010. This will take place from 14 to 17 April 2010 at the Barcelo Oxford Hotel, in Oxford , UK. The programme of the conference will feature a special track on software testing, and sessions on concurrent and distributed systems, C++, Java, agile development and Erlang !

Francesco Cesarini (founder of Erlang Solutions Ltd.) and Ulf Wiger (CTO of Erlang Solutions Ltd.) will be speaking at ACCU 2010. Francesco's talk will be on Styling your Architecture in an Evolving Concurrent World and Ulf's on Message-Passing Concurrency in Erlang .

Tutorial: Practical Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini

On Wednesday, 3rd February 2010 in London  Francesco Cesarini ,  author of ' Erlang Programming '  also founder of Erlang Solutions Ltd. will give a tutorial on Practical Erlang Programming .

The tutorial covers the basic, sequential and concurrent aspects of the Erlang programming language. You will learn the basics of how to read, write and structure Erlang programmes. The target audience is software developers and engineers with an interest in server side applications and massively concurrent systems.

The goal of the tutorial is a hands-on introduction to the theory and concepts behind sequential and concurrent Erlang programming, explaining the Erlang syntax, semantics and concurrency model. We conclude with an overview of the error handling mechanisms used to build fault tolerant systems with five nines availability.

The tutorial will take place in the Caesar Room, Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB. To learn more about the tutorial, please go here and if you want to book it click here .