[erlang-questions] Mixing casts and calls

[David Welton]

Hi,

I am working with a system that looks like this:

C node <=======> Erlang <========> Java Node

And we're looking at good ways to integrate everything.

For instance, we want the Java node to be able to do a simple query
that ends up getting some data from the C node, say, the version it's
running or something like that.

Since the Java code needs to be simple, we want to do the equivalent
of rpc:call(hw_server, get_version, []) and wait for the answer. It
shouldn't take long, and timeouts or whatever can be handled by Java
in that case.

However, to interact with the C node, the gen_server that manages it
would want to do something like:

{any, 'c@REDACTED'} ! get_version

And then get the answer via handle_info.

But if we're going to transform what is essentiall a 'call' -
hw_server:get_version() - into a cast/response, somewhere there's got
to be a receive.  For instance:

get_version() ->
   Ref = make_ref(),
   gen_server:cast(hw_server, {get_version, Ref}),
   receive
      {Ref, version, Version} ->
          Version
    end

This feels like I've left OTP behind though.

We could put the receive in the handle_cast for the gen_server, but
then that's going to block the whole thing on one call, which strikes
me as a bad idea, although I guess it could also be used to protect
the C node if it were unable to process more than one thing at once.

Another approach would be to further work with our Java guy to have
him send and receive the messages, but we were kind of hoping to hide
some of the complexity from that part of the system.

Thank you,
-- 
David N. Welton

http://www.welton.it/davidw/

http://www.dedasys.com/