starting OTP applications?

[Andy Kriger]

There appear to be many ways to start applications used by an OTP
application....
* From the supervisor, setup child processes (Webmachine's does this
in the template it creates for a new WM app).
* From the application, call application:start on related applications
via some kind of ensure_started function
* Reltool, which I don't even partially grok, appears to setup scripts
based on a config file and is responsible for starting related
applications (?)
* Have I missed any?

Is there a preferred way to do this that applies to both applications
& releases equally?

(I say equally, because I ran into problems getting my application
which runs locally from a start script to work as a release - it
appeared that the application's start or start_link function that I
use to setup my database was never called, meaning the tables were not
automagically craeted on first run - mind you, we're talking PEBCAK
here because I'm still learning how all this works and undoubtably
don't understand fully the order of things in the script that reltool
created).

-- 
Be well,
andy

Welcome to http://householder-yogi.net
On family, NYC, and practicing yoga.