Build your next website with Erlang — the world’s most advanced networking platform.
Do you pine for a simpler time when web pages loaded in under one second? Chicago Boss is the answer to slow server software: a Rails-like framework for Erlang that delivers web pages to your users as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Heard that name after such a long time. I recall encountering it over a decade ago. I recall the description and claims made on the site was much more “hyped up” than it is now.
Yeah I remember Chicago Boss when it was brand spanking new! It had a lot of features and usability things in it but was a bit ‘too heavy’ for my projects so never got around to giving it a proper shakedown.
Wow, the memories! ChicagoBoss was my introduction to Erlang back in 2011. I think it was the version 0.3 or so
I liked it, but the company I was working on decided to drop/rewrite the project due to the lack of Erlang devs
The original author Evan Miller moved on to focus on other projects, and it kind of gradually faded out. Also last time I looked it still relied quite heavily on parameterised modules, which were seen as an evolutionary dead-end in Erlang and were deprecated (maybe removed) quite a few releases ago - there’s still a parse transform somewhere that enables them but they’re not a very idiomatic(?) or natural way of programming in Erlang. It’s a shame because CB had a lot to offer but it was perhaps … not a very Erlang-y approach?
Yup. Evan is a brilliant dude, and he did a lot of neat things with CB. Aside from the reliance on P-Mods, CB added some interesting modifications to the language (like adding unicode operators (e.g. ∈)) and underlying all of that was a lot of magic to make the MVC work.
Unfortunately, while ChicagoBoss was a cool project, Evan never actually did anything with it commercially. As a result, there wasn’t really a financial incentive to stick around, and his heart was more in statistics than web development (not to speak on his behalf or anything). So he set out to find his fortune and glory.
After Evan dipped, @zkessin and I were both briefly brought in to lead CB development, but for me anyway, managing CB was a little too much to add, between that and also managing Nitrogen and my own business.
Dmitry Polyanovsky did his best running it for several years after that. I have no idea why new development stopped. Maybe the product he was running was shut down or migrated to a new platform.
Others have provided background on Chicago Boss. I’ll just observe that Zotonic ( https://zotonic.com/ ) seems to be a pretty viable Erlang solution and that we’re also using Phoenix/Liveview (Elixir) integrated with Erlang backends as our web solution. We definitely prefer keeping our business logic in Erlang but the Elixir folks’ strength seems to be solidly in the web space (given the Ruby/Rails history) so it’s definitely an area where I see us letting Elixir in some on the periphery of our systems.
