[erlang-questions] Replicated messaging in Erlang?

[CGS]

Hi Adam,

If I understood correctly your question, there are two points there:
1. how you can replicate a message;
2. how you can be sure that the message is received.

If that is the case, here are few simple answers (hopefully, more skilled
Erlang users will come with better ideas/solutions):

1. Take a look at gproc or any equivalent implementation.

2. That depends on how the message is sent, but the general solution is to
have a reply from the receiver. Here are two simple solutions for doing
that:

a) Message sent via threads messaging (Pid ! MyMessage):
-> sender: ReceiverPid ! {self(), MyMessage}
-> receiver listener (basics only):
receive
    Message -> {SenderPid, SenderMessage} = Message, SenderPid ! received
    ...
end
or you can add SenderPid in the group of receivers.

b) Message sent via TCP connection (for the receiver only; the sender
should have also a listener to be able to receive the answer):
listen_socket(Socket) ->
    case gen_tcp:recv(Socket, 0) of
          {ok,Data} ->
              gen_tcp:send(Socket,<<"received">>),
              listen_socket(Socket);
         ...
    end.

These are only few basic options. Of course, there are many other options
(e.g., monitoring your receiver). I resume my answer to a simple one. Take
care of the length of the queue (if you need a personalized queue, I
suggest gen_fsm).

I hope this answer helps and if I misunderstood your problem, I kindly ask
you to ignore my answer.

CGS




On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 12:47 PM, Adam Warski <adam@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've been looking at the Erlang ecosystem, and coming from a Java world, I
> am wondering what is the "Erlang way" to implement the following.
>
> The use case is very simple: I want to receive requests from users, and
> later process them asynchronously. However I want to be sure that if a
> request is received, it will be safe from single-node crashes, in other
> words, I want requests to be replicated across my cluster.
>
> In Java I would implement it using a replicated message queue. However
> RabbitMQ doesn't have replicated queues, only the meta-data is clustered
> (as far as I know). Mnesia has replication, but then it is a database, not
> a queue (although you could probably implement a mq ontop od that, but I
> didn't see anybody doing that).
>
> So how would you implememt this in Erlang? :)
>
> Regards,
> Adam Warski
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20120727/2ad71207/attachment.htm>