Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Building the Name Server

A name server is a program that, given a name, returns a value associated with that name. We can also change the value associated with a particular name.

Our first name server is extremely simple. It is not fault tolerant, so all the data it stores will be lost if it crashes. The point of this exercise is not to make a fault-tolerant name server but to get started with distributed programming techniques.

Stage 1: A Simple Name Server

Our name server kvs is a simple Key → Value, server. It has the following interface:

-spec kvs:start() -> true

Start the server; this creates a server with the registered name kvs.

-spec kvs:store(Key, Value) -> true

Associate Key with Value.

-spec kvs:lookup(Key) -> {ok, Value} | undefined ...