The choice of using lightweight comes out from the fact that each service in lelylan solve one specific problem, which make it easy to replace or extend existing and new functionalities. I'll think about a more proper word to express it.
As far as I know of OpenHAB, I would say that lelylan main difference consists on the microservices architecture. What they actually do, is pretty similar.
Here you can find the services list
https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development. Any idea to avoid this problem? I just added a note section in the beginning of the documentation to mitigate it.
I agree with what you say. If starting right now Scala and Elixir would be the who choices I would be looking for. I started in Ruby and Node because of my personal knowledge with these languages and because they are widely used by open source communities.
Nonetheless, I would also say that the specific blocks taking care of the hardware communication can be easily replaced, adding the right technology to the right service.
Lelylan brings a new point of view starting from REST API because there are dozens of people fascinated about home automation, that can't experiment on it, because they should buy physical hardware. What if I could experiment with natural languages, voice recognitions, gestures and more, without paying one dollar? Wouldn't it be better? It's time to experiment new solution, to improve life in our houses.
Today we have more than 10 existing standards. Devices in this way just do not communicate. Sure, the second step will be giving hardware at lower price and easier to install, but right now the most important part is to make home automation accessible to everyone.
About the website and the english, time will improve it. We are still in a early phase, and in few months we will release the API. Right now we are looking for comments and critiques to better improve.