Web applications unification

[Mikael Karlsson]

Hi,

The workgroup at www.erlang-projects.org for a Web applications unification
seems really interesting and the visions are impressive. I do not know the 
progress of the project but expect that it is quite a lot of work to be done,
even when implemented in Erlang :-)

Meanwhile I have a question how to get the act together to use some of the
existing applications/libraries for a more simple web application framework -
in a jboss (www.jboss.org) or Apache/Tomcat fashion.
Erlang makes it "easy" to write http servers and clients and it seems that 
everyone contributing with applications like xmlrpc, idx-soap, proxies etc. 
roll their own. This is fine as long as it runs standalone, but when you want 
to integrate services in an application framework things get more 
complicated. So why not set some kind of standard interface or framework
to build it on?

Like:
- http server: Yaws
- http client:  inets (originally jnets) http.erl
- ODBC, Corba etc: Erlang/OTP
- application control/configuration: Erlang/OTP
- authentication: eldap ?
- XML: xmerl
- XML-RPC: xmlrpc (with interface to yaws and inets/http client)
- SOAP: idx-soap (with interface to yaws and inets/http client)

I think most things are (almost) in place to build a *really good* web
application framework with Erlang.
And I think that any higher order applications as the "Web applications
unification" would benefit from a standard interface too.

So, is this a good idea, any ideas how to get the things together? 
Would one need a dedicated framework application to drive and 
configure the others?

/Mikael