The 12th Erlang User Conference took place in Stockholm, Sweden, on November the 9th and 10th, 2006. It was a very good year for Erlang with massive audience attending at the conference.
This year was truly a very good year for the Erlang User Conference with a large audience, many ongoing and exciting projects and a community boosted by the rise of interest in the language during the past year.
The conference took place as usual in Ericsson headquarter in Älvsjö and gather 140 people this year, coming from all over the world. Europe was the most represented continent, but we meet a few people from America, Asia and Oceania. Interest for Erlang development has spread worldwide.
This year the conference lasted on day and a half instead of the usual one day format, and I expect next year edition to last even longer as the program with packed with interesting talks and discussion.
So what are the major things happening in the Erlang world today ?
1. Erlang is getting more and more good press, and that’s what people are reporting from all over the world. Nowadays, when you talk about Erlang to someone you just meet, there is a very good chance that he will know about the language but also that he will have a positive opinion on the language. Erlang is actually becoming a flagship of the Functional Programming approach, with two major Haskell proponents involved in Erlang talks this year: John Hugues and Simon … This is nice to see this cross fertilization happening.
2. Erlang is catching up on the global internet buzz scale and get a bit more of the credit it deserve. The blogosphere has been largely discussing the Erlang language during the last few months. It helps the community growing. More projects are started and more libraries are under development which should accelerate the phenomenon. Among them: ErlHive and ErlyWeb are good candidate for the next killer web web framework. This is probably a good sign that Erlang has starting moving to a new area and that it can also be strong in the web development domain.
3. Erlang based company are doing very well. The Erlang User Conference was full of entrepreneurs sharing their success stories and everyone was confident about the future of their business. No doubt this will have an impact on the Erlang language health by increasing the number of Erlang developers in the world and the number of libraries shared. For example:
- Kreditor is a startup that have setup a large invoicing system for electronic commerce in Sweden. The system has been written entirely in Erlang and the company has shown that it was probably one of their greatest competitive advantage.
- Quviq is also a promising company that distribute a software framework called Quickcheck to ease and improve testing of large scale software.
- ProcessOne involvement in the ejabberd project has been also remark, as it one of the few software project that has the potential to become the Erlang killer app.
4. At ProcessOne, we were presenting two major projects:
- CEAN, presented by Christophe Romain. CEAN stands for Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network and aims to become a large central multiplatform repository for Erlang code. The slides of the presentation are available here.
- HordeLeader, presented by Jérôme Sautret. HordeLeader is a framework to develop web-based cluster aware console in Erlang. The slides of the presentation are available here.
Both talks have risen a very strong interest. Stay tuned for our next steps !
The Erlang User of the Year 2006 award has been granted to Alexey Shchepin for his work on ejabberd.
You can get the full conference program from Erlang User Conference 2006 page.
For another coverage of the Erlang User Conference, you could also check Yariv Sadan blog.
Pictures of the events are available on the EUC2006 page.
