Suggested Example

[Jeffrey Straszhiem]

Hi,

Yesterday I read the new document up on the Erlang site regarding the
experiences of the Sendmail folks.  One point I found interesting, and
which matches my own experience, is their difficulty figuring out the
OTP framework for applications, supervisors, gen_server's and such.

I've read the Erlang book and I basically understanding how to use the
language.  I've also read through most of the OTP docs, and I think I
understand most of what I read, but I still can't see the forest for
the trees.  I get the basic idea of setting up supervisors and worker
processes, but there are many, many details which are not obvious from
the docs.

A tutorial on building an OTP application would be nice.  Including
some design advice, structuring the supervisors, putting together some
basic generic behaviors, a error tracking and logging discipline, and
so forth.  Also it would be great if this example used one or two of
the more important parts of OTP, such as Mnesia and SASL.

I understand the difficulty of putting a tutorial like this together,
and don't expect to see anything on that order soon.  However, it
would be nice to have a simple, but fairly complete, Erlang
application to look at -- and by that I mean a skeleton of one.  I
know I could look at Mnesia or something, but I'd rather focus all of
my meager understanding on figuring out the OTP structures instead of
the specifics of the database.

Any suggestions?

-- Jeffrey Straszheim              |  A sufficiently advanced
-- Systems Engineer, Programmer    |  regular expression is
-- http://www.shadow.net/~stimuli  |  indistinguishable from
-- stimuli AT shadow DOT net       |  magic