There’s a lot to do about Twitter these days. Most notably for the scalability issues they are experiencing. The topic of scalability happens to be one of my areas of interest. To that end I have tracked the programming language Erlang for a number of years now, bought the book Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong, and started reading it now that I have an idea for small project that might be a perfect fit for Erlang. Erlang is an extremely interesting language that provides an unique approach to issues of scalability. The concept of Concurrency Oriented Programming [PDF] (processes, message passing, share nothing) is tempting and conceptually so much easier than the multi-threading approach used in pretty much every other language.

Yariv Sadan, the developer of ErlyWeb (a Erlang based web development framework), just released Twoorl. Twoorl is a Twitter clone. And though I have never used Twitter, I did sign up for Twoorl. I want to get a feeling for how the application works and performs while I study its code. That also happens to be one of Yariv’s reasons for developing Twoorl; an open source example that demonstrates how to use ErlyWeb. Excellent initiative. Thank you Yariv!

BTW Here’s my Twoorl page: http://twoorl.com/users/Guido