Roberto Saccon, is currently working on soon-to-be-launched Erlang based products and services targeted to Web application development and deployment. Previously, Roberto has played key roles in setting up and maintaining e-banking websites at Major Swiss financial institution, has experience as an application engineer for telecoms and as an independant consultant has provided OS and DB administration, Java development and project management services. Since these roles, Roberto has been looking for ways to improve performance, stability and most of all, the workflow of creating, deploying and scaling web applications and has recently founded Skast, LLC, a Micro-ISV. Roberto regularly writes on his blog rsaccon.com and occaisionally on cometdaily.com about the Web and Erlang related Open Source projects.

Today web development is dominated by PHP, ASP, RubyOnRails and numerous Java frameworks, most of them focus on serverside HTML generation. Web developers start to become aware of Erlang, but the majority doesn’t feel yet the need to leave their easily learned and simple to use language or framework. Any attempt to write a web framework in a functional language so far mostly managed to attract only developers which were already familiar with that specific language. But next generation Ajax Web applications are different and have different web server and framework requirements and fortunately this requirements match very well with what Erlang has to offer.

In this talk Roberto will present an overview of browser interface techniques and explain when to use Ajax and when alternatives should/could be considered. He will give an in-depth view on Comet HTTP-push techniques and available implementations in Erlang such as ErlyComet. He will also cover HTML and CSS rendering with ErlyDTL, an Erlang implementation of the Django Template Language and about caching strategies and serverside image generation. You will learn how to integrate the open source Dojo javascript toolkit and use its data binding and templating possibilities.

Roberto will also discuss his work in progress and attempt of bringing the Erlang runtime to the masses of Ajax Developers by providing a Javascript flavored Erlang, a Compiler written in Erlang which takes Javascript source code, transforms it into Core Erlang and compiles it to Erlang byte code. This will allow Ajax developers to write the serverside application logic as well in Javascript, reduce code redundancy and getting the Erlang runtime benefits such as concurrency, scalability, fault tolerance and performance without having to learn the Erlang syntax.