Building Momentum with Linux and Erlang

If you have checked out the momentum project on github you noticed there is nothing there yet.  Not only do the project ideas need to be fleshed out, but the technology stack needs to be defined as well which is what I have been focusing on this past week.  Normally I would insist that the requirements drive the technology however as a spare time endeavor this project affords me the opportunity to learn technologies I don’t have access to at my “day job”.  With the new year approaching I decided to bite the bullet and use this project as a vehicle to learn a new language.  So last week I threw a few functional languages into a hat and guess what emerged… Erlang! 

I am super excited to build the first momentum prototype using Erlang.  Reading about the hot code swapping feature was enough to get me hooked.  For the platform I have chosen linux.  There is a new service called Suse Studio (fantastic web site) that makes building linux images easy even for an old Windoze guy like me!  Joe Freeman put together a nice blog post about using this service to setup an Erlang environment.  At this point I am thinking that with a touch of couchdb, mochiweb, erlyweb, erlware, etc one could create a pretty neat linux live cd to install or host a momentum instance\server\node.  If you are interested drop me a line and I will send you the download link to my current development image.

So this is the technology stack for now.  I held a vote with all the project team members at this point (me) and it was unanimous.  Until requirements emerge that lead us away from this platform it is time to have some fun.  Armed with Programming Erlang most of my blog posts for the new year will document my adventures with these tools as well as explore how we can build a system that is capable of calculating the momentum of a software project in a meaningful way.

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Related posts:

1. Cloud Wars the Game
2. Building Momentum
3. Another Year in the Books…