YAWS (Yet Another Webserver) is a HTTP 1.0/1.1 webserver which is completely written in Erlang. YAWS has been noted well suited for dynamic-content web applications in many cases.

Most developers who are moving from other web development environments to Erlang and Yaws will have used other web servers such as Nginx or Apache. The Erlang Yaws web server performs the same basic tasks, but the details of performing common actions are often different.

Erlang is not only a language, but also a runtime system and something that looks a lot like an application server. As such, Erlang and Yaws (or other web servers) will fill the same role as Apache/PHP/MySQL and other components all in one system.

The major differences between Erlang/Yaws and Apache/PHP have a lot to do with how Erlang tends to set things up. Erlang assumes that systems will be clustered, and processes…