Trainer: 

Target Audience: Software Developers

Prerequisites: Basic Erlang knowledge, Linux or OSX, Erlang R16+, Basic OTP knowledge;

Objectives:

  *  Write efficient Websocket applications

  *  Master REST services

  *  Understand the Cowboy internals

  *  Learn tricks to reach more than 1 million connections per servers

Registration: 08:30 on 11 June

Venue: 

The course teaches everything there is to know about using the Cowboy HTTP server and writing applications for it. We will first go through the basics, reminisce about HTTP, how to start listening for connections and how to send static files or a reply dynamically. We will then move on to Websocket programming and write a distributed chat application. 

Then we will look at REST, understand what it means, when to use it and how. We will then create a REST based cache application using Cowboy and ets. Finally we will look together at the performance of the two applications we previously built and learn how we can achieve greater concurrency.

  *  Day 1: Introduction, Websocket part 1

  *  Day 2: Websocket part 2, REST part 1

  *  Day 3: REST part 2, Advanced topics

Introduction

This section gets you started with Cowboy and shows how to start listeners, send files, send replies from Erlang code and various beginner subjects. It should be pretty easy to understand and serves as getting you ready for the rest of the training. 

Websocket part 1

This section starts by explaining how Websocket works, and what you can do with it. We then start working on building our chat service, first by making it work on a single server. We will then discuss how to make that application distributed, leaving you the evening to come up with solutions. 

Websocket part 2

This section shows how to make the chat application distributed, answering any questions that may have arisen after the first day. 

REST part 1

This section defines REST and teaches you how to use it. We will write the bases of a cache server, then make it auto-discoverable and write a small REST client that works without any previous knowledge about the service. Then we will talk about making that server more useful, leaving you the evening to finish it.

REST part 2

This section finishes the server, making sure everyone has an equivalent application, and answering any remaining questions.

Advanced topics

This section shows how to reach high number of connections with our chat service, and how to reach high throughput with our cache service. We will go through Cowboy internals and debugging tricks to get the most out of it. We will finish with a final discussion on everything we did during the training, answering any remaining questions.