Smarkets Blog

I’m an unabashed open source fanboy. At Smarkets, I use a lot of software written by other people. Here is a quick summary of the Smarkets stack; think of them as geek shoutouts.

• Erlang – Almost everything is built atop the Erlang/OTP application system. I like functional programming. It is easier to manage complexity in a language with reasonably isolated side effects. Erlang’s concurrency primitives have been touted many times before, and conceptualising concurrent systems as communicating sequential processes now feels a lot more natural than other paradigms. As Damien Katz recently mentioned, systems built atop Erlang/OTP don’t seem to suffer the same failures under high load as certain other garbage collected languages do.
• Distel on Emacs – When writing code (and actually quite a bit more), I like Emacs. When writing Erlang, I like Distel. It provides a natural entry point for debugging pieces of Erlang code. Getting Emacs to communicate with an inferior Erlang VM is especially useful for rapid prototyping. Being able to do everything within Emacs is good for productivity.
• Mnesia – Arbitrary term storage is a simple way to avoid having to interface with another database management system. Because Mnesia is part of Erlang/OTP, you get it for free.
• Mochiweb and nginx – Thanks to Bob Ippolito and Matthew Dempsky (and others I’m sure I’ve missed) for the mochiweb HTTP toolkit. It’s lightweight and embeddable, so it was very easy for us to integrate with our backend. Nginx performs well and is very simple to integrate with a backend powered by mochiweb.
• sgte and StringTemplate – Filippo Pacini’s sgte template engine (“inspired by” StringTemplate) was the basis for our templating system.
• YXA – While we don’t specifically deploy any SIP software, YXA is a great example of well-written Erlang. I learned a lot from reading through Magnus Ahltorp and Fredrik Thulin’s code. It’s been around for several years and has matured quite a bit as a result.
• Flat files – Writing a binary file to disk is sometimes overlooked as a solid way to persist sequential data that’s only needed locally. I’m not sure who I should thank here, but I think the list would probably be pretty long.