Question

I programmed in Ruby and Rails for quite a long time, and then I fell in love with the simplicity of the Sinatra framework which allowed me to build one page web applications.

Is there a web framework like Sinatra available for Erlang? I tried Erlyweb but it seems far too heavyweight.

Answer 1

You could achieve something minimal with mochiweb:

start() ->
  mochiweb_http:start([{'ip', "127.0.0.1"}, {port, 6500},
                       {'loop', fun ?MODULE:loop/1}]).
                           % mochiweb will call loop function for each request

loop(Req) ->
  RawPath = Req:get(raw_path),
  {Path, _, _} = mochiweb_util:urlsplit_path(RawPath),   % get request path

  case Path of                                           % respond based on path
    "/"  -> respond(Req, <<"<p>Hello World!</p>">>);
    "/a" -> respond(Req, <<"<p>Page a</p>">>);
    ...
    _    -> respond(Req, <<"<p>Page not found!</p>">>)
  end.

respond(Req, Content) ->
  Req:respond({200, [{<<"Content-Type">>, <<"text/html">>}], Content}).

If you need advanced routing, you will have to use regex’s instead of a simple case statement.