Nick Gerakines

I was doing some writing this evening and out of the blue, I was struck with the urge to create what would be the “mod_erlang” Apache module. I’ve heard of several really cool stories of using c/c++ apps as entry points to Erlang grids and it sounded like a really cool idea to pursue.

Then I remembered what developing Apache modules was like and was immediately discouraged.

Meanwhile, I was also thinking about nginx and the several nginx vs X articles that I’ve read recently and was curious about nginx’s support for plugins and extensions. Low and behold nginx has a pretty nifty extension/module framework and minutes later I was digging through the documentation.

The idea of using a solid c or c++ application for managing the tear down and build up of HTTP requests and using Erlang to actually process the request sounds like a win. I think Erlang is an ideal language and platform for building back-end minded services and application tiers and have been pushing this belief heavily. Using an application like nginx, apache2 or a home-brew interface to provide an entry/access point into and Erlang grid is what I’m going for with this project.

http://github.com/ngerakines/erlang_nginx/tree/master

Right now, it’s in the early development stages and exists only as a proof of concept. The features that I’m developing toward include the ability to break down a request into it’s URI, headers and body and pass that into an Erlang grid’s handler process as defined by a configuration variable. The request would wait for a specific amount of time for a message to be sent back that would include the status code, headers and response body that would be displayed to the user.

Another interesting path would be to compose whatever body is needed by the cnode/application. An example would be having the response from the grid be a tuple representing the type of response and components of the response and having the cnode/application create the json, xml or protocol buffers response bdoy based on that message.

I’m open to your thoughts, questions and comments. I don’t claim to be a stellar c developer, so please help me and this project by not only taking a look at the code and contributing, but also telling me what I did wrong and why you changed what you did. As development continues, I’ll probably use I Play WoW as a guinea pig and will post results as I can.