Initial impressions of yaws

If any of this post is incorrect, please feel free to post a comment and correct me.

I have recently installed yaws and I am looking at it to create a small website. It will be fairly simple. My previous web experience has been using Nevow with Twisted. Nevow allows you to create xml files and then the template engine extracts information from the xml file which is translated to function calls on an object representing the page. I like this solution. It keeps the code seperate from presentation which many people seem to suggest is a good idea. I see it as a positive purely based on working with webdesigners. I dislike doing web frontends so allowing someone to make that and giving them the bare minimum needed to let them call functions in my code seems rather nice. From my experiences with yaws, it seems to use a style that reminds me more of PHP. The major difference being that you can use Erlang terms to be transformed to HTML. Nevow has something similar to this called stan. Even with this though, the .yaws file is still not purely Erlang code, but requires escaping html with a tag.  This style of making web applications seems fairly error prone and difficult to work with in a team.
I do think Erlang would make a fairly good web development language. The applications could easily be distributed over several nodes, not requiring one to use some sort of load balancer. A web app could scale quite well. But what can be done about the interface for programming? Some sort of XML system might work but I’m not convinced of that. There must be some more intuitive means of mixing code and presentation. I wouldn’t be sirprised if someone has attempted to tackle this already, maybe something exists on google about it.

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