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Presentation: Building RESTful Web Services with Erlang and YAWS

by Abel Avram on May 18, 2009 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

In this presentation recorded at QCon SF 2008, Steve Vinoski shows how to create RESTful web services using YAWS and Erlang. The presentation introduces YAWS and offers YAWS-Erlang code snippets on how to implement REST principles.

Watch: Building RESTful Web Services with Erlang and Yaws (1h)

Steve introduces YAWS – Yet Another Web Server – a highly concurrent web server optimized for delivering dynamic content. YAWS web pages can contain Erlang code which is executed before the resulting HTML is sent to the client. YAWS can run as a stand-alone application or it can be embedded into another Erlang application. According to some test results, YAWS can handle more traffic and way more connections than Apache.

Steve shows how to create RESTful web services using Erlang and YAWS. The concrete examples cover the following topics:

Resources and identifiers
Representations and media types
Hypermedia and linking
HTTP Methods
Conditional GET

While doing that, Steve explains the following concepts: Ehtml – an HTML page with Erlang code in it –, Appmod – a YAWS application module –, Yapps – a YAWS application.