[erlang-questions] Message Passing over the 'Net

[Timothy Baldridge]

Greetings,

I'm a recent convert to Erlang. I'm still reading up a bit on the
language, then I plan on trying out some basic "Hello World" apps
before diving into a more complex program.

I have a few questions about Erlang's message passing. I understand
the basic idea behind message passing in Erlang, and how processes can
be distributed to other physical machines. Is there a way to pass
messages like this across a rather unsafe medium like the Internet?
For instance, I'd like to write a client/server app where users can
login to the main server over the Internet. Both ends of the program
will be in Erlang. Now I know I could write marshaling routines to
pack and unpack the data on either end, and shove the packaged data
over TCP/IP, but it would be much nicer if Erlang had a way that was
as simple as PID ! message.

And secondly, if the above is possible, is it possible to encrypt the
communication by piping it through a SSL connection? I'm sure there
has to be something like this.

Thanks for the help, as a big fan of the Python language, let me say
that Erlang's feature set was what made me decide to switch. Python
has many bottlenecks, and Erlang, while different, takes care of most
of these issues.

Thanks,

Timothy

-- 
Two wrights don't make a rong, they make an airplane. Or bicycles.