Erlang and OTP in Action

Chapter 12. Integrating with foreign code using ports and NIFs

This chapter covers

• Ports, linked-in drivers, and natively implemented functions (NIFs)
• Integrating a third-party C library
• Integrating the C library using NIFs

At this point, the cache does a number of interesting things, such as log its actions, distribute across multiple nodes, and automatically connect to the cluster. It also has a RESTful HTTP interface for storing binary data, as well as a simpler text-based TCP interface for storing Erlang terms in general. Overall, the Erlware people are happy. But it would be nice if the clients who use the HTTP interface were able to store structured data in a standard way, and without doing their own marshalling and unmarshalling. The ...