Introducing Erlang

Chapter 11. Getting Started with OTP

At this point, it might seem like you have all you need to create process-oriented projects with Erlang. You know how to create useful functions, can work with recursion, know the data structures Erlang offers, and probably most important, know how to create and manage processes. What more could you need?

Process-oriented programming is great, but the details matter. The basic Erlang tools are powerful, but can also bring you to frustrating mazes debugging race conditions that happen only once in a while. Mixing different programming styles can lead to incompatible expectations, and code that worked well in one environment may prove harder to integrate in another.

Ericsson encountered these problems early, and created a set of libraries that eases them. OTP, the Open Telecom Platform, is useful for pretty much any large-scale project you want to do with Erlang, not just telecom work. It’s included with Erlang, and though it isn’t precisely part of the language, it is definitely part of Erlang culture. The boundaries of where Erlang ends and OTP begins aren’t always clear, but the entrypoint is definitely behaviors. You’ll combine processes built with behaviors and managed by supervisors into an OTP application.

So far, the lifecycle of the processes shown in the previous chapters has been pretty simple. If needed, they set up other resources or processes to get started. Once running, they listen for messages and process them, collapsing if they ...