Date: Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 6:30 PM - Social, 7:00 PM Talk
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year.

Topic

Francesco Cesarini: "Erlang Concurrency, What’s the Fuss?

Erlang’s concurrency model has been used in commercial systems for well over 15 years, but what differentiates it from other technologies? What are the constructs, what makes them so powerful and scalable, and when using them, what change in mindset is required from the developers? What makes Erlang an excellent choice when developing with SMP in mind? This talk, based on 15 years of concurrent functional programming in Erlang, attempts to answer all these questions. It covers the constructs which provide the concurrency model and the fault tolerance built around it. With live demos, we will be providing benchmarks on process creation and message passing. We will give practical examples of IM and SMS based systems which make the correct use of the concurrency model, providing case studies of systems that work, and ones that don’t. The talk will conclude with Erlang Training & Consulting’s experiences of using Erlang on multi-processor machines, and the challenges this boost in performance is giving our developers.

Yariv Sadan: Erlang explained by example

Erlang was originally designed for building large-scale real-time messaging systems. It has not been widely adopted among web developers, largely because it lacked good web development tools. This is unfortunate because Erlang's strengths in concurrency, distributed programming, and fault tolerance can be advantageous for web applications. ErlyWeb was created to fill this gap: its goal is to make building websites using Erlang as simple as, if not simpler than, using popular scripting languages such as Ruby, PHP and Python. In this talk, we will give a brief overview of ErlyWeb and show how to use it to create a simple real-time web-based chat application in Erlang.

Bio

Yariv Sadan is the creator and lead developer of ErlyWeb. He has used
ErlyWeb to create Vimagi (http://vimagi.com ), a website for creating and sharing paintings, and Twoorl (http://twoorl.org ), an open source Twitter clone. He has written many articles about Erlang programming in his blog (http://yarivsblog.com). Yariv works for Facebook on the Facebook Platform. He studied math, computer science and economics at Rutgers College.

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