I’ve never really liked the way that Erlang’s existing tools generally force one to accept “releases” as the One True Way to structure, build, test, launch and deploy Erlang programs. We have escript, of course, which is fantastic, but it does come with a few handicaps such as making it a somewhat cubmersome and magical process to write OTP-structured programs as scripts.
“Why do would you care about this? Isn’t Erlang what you use for writing game servers and streaming servers and web servers and… the key word being ‘server’?”
I care because I also write a lot of client-side code and Erlang provides a very smooth paradigm for writing networked GUI and CLI programs. While how to best structure those has been a bit of an exploratory art of its own since the first release of Erlang’s GUI bindings, the best way to deploy them to client systems (that is “end-user systems” — yes, the unwashed, non-technical masses) has been one of those subjects people tend to wave off because, well, nobody wants to discuss it and, “HAH! Who would write client-side Erlang without endless armies of tech support goons around the product?!?”.
Well, now we can (or at least I can).
I’ve started on a suite of tools that handles source templating for projects (GUI apps, CLI utilities, escripts, traditional OTP applications and library projects), packaging of them, distribution and resolution of the packages, building, and launching (in a “first-run means automatic deployment” paradigm) in a way that a developer familiar with other dynamic scripting languages would probably feel more at home with.
I’m still messing about with a few of the minor features (like text search for packages based on tags, a GUI application browser, an installer for Windows, and so on) but the core of it is in place for developers already.
If you’re an Erlanger or perhaps just Erlang-curious but never were quite sure how to get started with writing Erlang programs because structuring an Erlang project was always a bit of a mystery you never had time to work your way through, give it a try and please give me some feedback so I can improve the tools.
The tool itself is called ZX and the distribution service node code is called Zomp. To run the installer it all you need is an Erlang runtime somewhere in $PATH.
Link here: ZX/Zomp