Before ErlyWeb there were already a lot of web application frameworks. Why do we need another one? Almost every other modern framework is written in a scripting language or compiled language that has drastically different characteristics from Erlang.

The benefits that come from being implemented in Erlang are what help set ErlyWeb apart from other web application frameworks.

Characteristics of Erlang

• a functional language with little shared state
• highly reliable
• distributed
• extremely lightweight processes
• message passing primitives

Erlang was designed to work this way because the problem domain that it was originally designed to work with, phone switches, requires them. The remarkable thing is, 20 years later, we are finding that building scalable websites would be made easier if we used a language with these characteristics.

Facebook - uses mochiweb, a lightweight webserver written in Erlang to allow over 70 million users chat with each other in real-time.