A few months ago a fellow developer was architecting a new app (soon to be launched) and he had a problem to solve:

Provide realtime updates in one or several devices after an event triggered by one of those devices

It had to be fault tolerant, performant… well, business as usual !

By the time i was quite interested in Erlang/Elixir, and i offered to prototype a solution. It just felt the right tool for the job.

All in all it was not that different of the canonical “hello world” of the Erlang VM languages … the chatroom example.

After a few days trying to find documentation and examples on websocket use i was able to prototype something in Erlang with cowboy.

Then things changed a bit. Prior to websocket connection “validation” a user should have a valid key stored in a database. And there would be a Redis channel to publish messages that had to be routed to a subset of the registered connected users.

It was time to refactor.

I opted to use Elixir and i’ve also added bullet ¹ to my previous cowboy setup. I also had to integrate a few libraries to:

• parse and output json
• connect to a database to verify identity
• subscribe to a Redis channel and listen to messages

I knew it would be a risk to chose a language which being actively developed (currently in version 0.12.4) but it just felt right !

On my next post i’ll dive into implementation details.