Everyone wants to talk about "conversational web services" nowadays, but the mental model of a conversation tends to be constrained by what our current web services frameworks are capable of delivering[1].

Erlang was designed for controlling real-time services of "conversational quality", meaning that the service should allow people to meet and converse with a "real-life" feeling, without disruptive delays and with a life-like presentation of information. Web frameworks in Erlang have largely copied the traditional MVC frameworks, but for the back-end logic, they have drawn on the full power of Erlang's distributed, real- time processing environment. In effect, Erlang frameworks have been constrained by the long-polling RESTful nature of today's web services, but can now start breaking out of that mold, with the advent of web sockets and other real-time delivery technologies for the web. This talk will illustrate how Erlang provides all the tools necessary for building the next generation of truly conversational web services.

[1] http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs100/webserv_adv/conversation.html