newbie questions

[Arnaud Bailly]

Hi to all erlangers,
I am newcomer on this list and wishes to quickly introduce myself
before asking some questions. Impatient readers can skip part I.

I) Background

I have been aware of erlang's existence
for several years (since the beginning of my PhD in fact) but never
took time to really learn it and make something useful. My interest
for erlang is motivated by;
 - an "theoretical" interest for 1) functional programming languages,
 2) distributed software development, 3) software reliability
 improvement
 - the will to walk different paths, beyond and over the current
 duality (at least in part of information systems engineering) Java
 vs. Microsoft. I have been doing intensive coding in Java for the
 last 8 years and always felt embarassed by some aspects of the
 language. This has grown to frustration when I started to work in IS
 context for various reasons mainly related to the unnecessary repetitive aspect
 of most computer engineering tasks taking place in such a context and
 the difficulty to promote different ways of thinking.

Now that I have settled myself as an independent contractor, I want to
take some time to try other ways and build a serious alternative offer
around non standard solutions providing improved reliability and
shorter development time. So I started a small project aimed at
comparing various solutions for implementing a basic web application
with an eye towards automated model based code generation, test cases
generation and eventually trying to use "serious" verification tools
like model-checkers.

II) Questions

Some questions about erlang that I did found answer for in the docs
(not that I searched very deeply):
 1. is there any testing framework equivalent to junit in erlang world
 (may be erlangers dont test, but I don't think so :-) ) ? I am also
 thinking about associated tools like code coverage measurements or
 test cases generators...
 2. in the same line of thought, is there something equivalent to
 maven or ant ? Is emake that kind of tool ? 
 3. I read here and there that erlang's support of string is
 inefficient and does not handle international character sets
 (eg. UTF-8 encoding). This may be (or not) an issue for web based
 development. Is this true ? 


 
Thanks a lot and my apologies for being somewhat verbose (java coder
bad manners :-) )

-- 
OQube < software engineering \ génie logiciel >
Arnaud Bailly, Dr.
\web> http://www.oqube.com