Using Erlang, CouchDB and RabbitMQ at Smarkets betting exchange (video)

[vide0star]

http://blog.smarkets.com/2009/07/03/smarkets-tech-talk-on-erlang/

[christofd]

-Nginx frontend with Python running for web templating

-URL requests are matched with Erlang patterns (and possibly some regexes with Nginx)

-Python/ Erlang bridge done with internal REST Api

-most unstructured data stored in CouchDB

-requests end up in RabbitMQ message queue

-how message queue and rules engine (collection of state machines) match up buyers and sellers is not explained

-how transactions between buyers and sellers are stored by appending to long files is not explained

-how either these long files are spread out to many machines, or how CouchDB is spread out is not explained

Interesting talk, but except for the buzzwords they didn't reveal much of their internals.

[davidw → christofd]

Thanks! People summarizing long videos deserve major upvoting.

[robk]

I'm excited for Smarkets to launch. Nice to see new startups in London as well.

[rjurney]

I wonder what Twitter would have already become if they had early adopted an architecture like this?

I'm not trolling. Erlang is clearly ideal for this kind of thing. I wonder what kind of advantage it will give them?

[davidw → rjurney]

They apparently tried it in a moment of desperation, but got scared by the "weird syntax". Or so I recall seeing in a slide somewhere...

[rjurney → davidw]

I like Erlang, and can read it... but not write it much. And the syntax scares me too :)