Video Slideshow, Introducing Webmachine

The Webmachine talk at Bay Area Erlang Factory 2009 went quite well. I received useful feedback, and some very interesting and productive conversations spun off after the talk.

For anyone interested who wasn't there, I have recorded a voiceover with the slides and made that video available here. The slides are the same ones used at the conference, but I trimmed the speaking portion a bit. This version is a bit under half an hour; it leaves out a few minor topics but still covers all of the material needed to introduce Webmachine.

Enjoy!

Webmachine 1.2

There are a few changes in webmachine-1.2 that deserve mention.

We simplified the API to the dispatcher module so that it can be used easily in a standalone fashion. In cases where another application (such as CouchDB) wants to use Webmachine-style dispatching, it is now easy to just call webmachine_dispatcher:dispatch/2 and get a useful result without any of the rest of Webmachine running. A trivial example:

1> webmachine_dispatcher:dispatch("/a",[{["a"],some_resource,[]}])
{some_resource,[],[],[],".",[]}

The other change that is most interesting from a feature point of view is that the request body is not read off the socket until the first time wrq:req_body/1 is called. This means that a resource can (for example) return an error response code without having to wait for the body to be pulled off the wire first.

There is also a change in the new_webmachine project creation script. Your list of dispatch terms will now by default be in a separate file ("priv/dispatch.conf") instead of directly in your application's _sup file.

This version is identified with the "webmachine-1.2" mercurial tag,

In upcoming versions, we hope to add a few much-clamored-for features such as host-based dispatching and incremental request/response body reading and writing.