[erlang-questions] Would like some feedback

[Chandru]

Hi Frans,

Here are a few comments with the caveat that I haven't spent any time
understanding the protocol. So the comments are more about implementation
style...

- Firstly, its quite impressive you've managed to write this in quite an
idiomatic style for your hobby project, so well done!
- You might want to consider naming all your modules with the 'axolotl_'
prefix to minimise the possibility of module name clashes when others use
your code
- It would be a good idea to put all your DB access operations in a module
such as axolotl_db.erl so that if you ever wanted to changed your database
backend, the changes are limited to one module. It might not be that
important for this particular application, but as rule of thumb it will
serve you well.
- You raise a good question about "... decide what goes into a new process
or is done in the calling process...". I'll try and clarify this with an
example. You have implemented identities:check_registration/2 as a
gen_server:call, but the code which handles this message in the handle_call
function is just reading from mnesia and returning a result. This need not
be a gen_server:call, it can be written as follows.

check(Registration_id, Dhi_pub) ->
    case mnesia:dirty_read(identity, Dhi_pub) of
        [#identity{registration_id = Registration_id}] ->
true;
        _ ->
false
    end.

This is because there is no value in putting it through the gen_server. It
still makes sense for the code to reside in this module as it logically
belongs here.

- Typically with Erlang applications, your mnesia initialisation code
should be separate from your normal running code. It is okay to expect the
user to run a one off installation function to create the required tables.
Also, it is not a good idea to delete schema and recreate it because it
becomes hard to use this as part of a node with other applications which
have their own mnesia tables.

- The code in prekeys.erl is a bit hard to read. You might want to move the
code from each of the handle_call function clauses into separate functions
which are invoked. This is probably partly due to my ignorance of the
protocol, but the code could be made to look cleaner.

- I couldn't see any test code in the modules, how are you testing this?

I hope this is of some help.

cheers,
Chandru



On 24 November 2015 at 18:18, Frans Schneider <schneider@REDACTED> wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> I've been learning Erlang in my spare-time for some time now and would
> love some feedback on a project I recently started. Since I have no
> coworkers or other people to get feedback from, maybe somebody on this list
> could have a quick look.
> The things I find particular difficult is defining a proper API, to decide
> what goes into a new process or is done in the calling process and dealing
> with errors. I have no formal training as a programmer which may be the
> reason I have trouble to get these things right.
>
> The project I took [1] was to implement the Axolotl ratcheting protocol
> from Open Whisper Systems [2]. The protocol [3] itself didn't look very
> difficult, but since there are no proper specs for the total system, I used
> the libaxolotl-java implementation as a starting pont [4]. Reading the Java
> code probably was the hardest part of the whole project.
>
> I think I covered most of the functionality of the libaxolotl-java
> library. I haven't verified interoperability between my implementation and
> libaxolotl-java since that would require me to start coding in Java which
> is not something I am looking forward to.
> Comparing my Erlang code with the original Java code, I needed far less
> lines of code and, I think, the code is much easier to understand. Also,
> building and deploying the code seems much simpler.
>
> So, any comments are most welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Frans
>
> [1] https://github.com/schnef/axolotl
> [2] https://www.whispersystems.org/
> [3] https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki
> [4] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libaxolotl-java
> Nice implementation https://github.com/rxcomm/pyaxo
>
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