We are not an Erlang company

ProcessOne has made a mark on Erlang history, developing reference software in Erlang, providing strong Erlang expertise and helping grow the its ecosystem. Still, ProcessOne is much more than our Erlang fame. We are technology agnostic. We are great at selecting the right tool for the job to build innovative projects for our customers.

TL;DR

ProcessOne is much more than an Erlang company and we can help you develop your projects in Go, Swift and Kotlin.

Our Erlang history

ProcessOne is an Erlang pioneer. The core team have been developing in Erlang since it was released as Open Source in 1998. We have been building the most famous Erlang project, the real-time messaging platform: ejabberd. Consequently, RabbitMQ followed suite because ejabberd led the way.

We used Erlang very early because it was the only way, at that time, to build highly robust and scalable platforms. ejabberd is able to handle a massive number of connections, supports clustering, get hot code upgrades – all because of the underlying Erlang VM.

We have been jumping on the Elixir bandwagon very soon for quite the same reasons. It is a technology that fills a niche, making it possible to build large scale real-time web platforms with a syntax that feels more familiar (especially for Ruby developers).

Innovation is our driver

When we started ProcessOne, there was no Amazon Web Service. Servers were multiple times slower than they are today. There was no Docker, no Kubernetes. Basically, there was no alternative to Erlang VM if you wanted to build a scalable and manageable service. And most of all, there was no iPhone and Android, whose support is now a critical component of many projects.

So, over the years, we had to refine what innovating for our customers meant, integrating new technologies in our skill set and our stack.

In the context of our customers’ projects, Erlang or even Elixir is not always the best answer. It is hard to find Erlang or Elixir skills and training an Erlang or an Elixir team is most of the time not desirable for customers. They often need to hire and train large set of developers and sysadmins. They need to have a path for innovation to fit their corporate culture. And finally, most of all, Erlang and Elixir are not enough to cover the client-side development, especially on mobile devices.

That’s why we had to refine our technology stack with innovation as our main focus.

Expanding our technology stack

Over the years, we had to expand our technology stack to have a good balance between innovation and ability for our customers to adopt it. We ended up developing the following additional skills to handle our customer projects:

• Go to handle server-side services and web applications. Go is very popular and provides good scalability and maintainability. Even if Go seems approachable and easy, writing very good Go code that feels like “native Go” and is maintainable, is hard. However, it is accessible for our customers and we have found it was quite easy to transfer the knowledge to customers’ teams. Once we have laid the basis and delivered a strong Go applications, it is easy for our customers to take over the projects. It works well with our Erlang components, as our customers can use them as black boxes.
• Swift to handle iOS native developments. This is the de facto standard in the Apple ecosystem. Given our high-profile customers target, cross-platform development is generally not enough. That’s why we are investing in providing state-of-the-art native code, following the latest standards on iOS/MacOS/Watch/TvOS.
• Kotlin to handle native Android developments. We target high-end projects that needs native developments with the latest features. Kotlin is the way to deliver future-proof code on Android.

We are still working on Erlang projects and you can expect the same involvement in ejabberd. Still, you can also expect us to talk more about our other skills and see new projects in those languages. Our Open Source software stack will get richer and serve as basic building bricks for our customers’ projects.

Summary

Given our unique Erlang history, we are often still seen as an Erlang company. While we have a unique expertise and a part of our customer-base work with us because of that Erlang or Elixir expertise, limiting ProcessOne to this small set of technologies could not be further from the truth.

We deliver full projects for customers that need to deliver innovative services, in record time. Finally, we hand over that innovation so that it can live for many years after we delivered our result.

Working with ProcessOne is like having your own team of R&D experts, that can bootstrap your project to help your reach the market before the competition, without compromise on the technology.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help building your projects, with the confidence that you will be able to integrate the innovation internally.