defining behaviours (Re: Design Patterns for Erlang)

[Mickael Remond]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Ulf Wiger wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Richard Carlsson wrote:
> 
>>There is a recent Master's thesis about design patterns and Erlang:
>>
>>    ftp://ftp.csd.uu.se/pub/papers/masters-theses/0178-ekstrom.pdf
>>
>>
>>	/Richard Carlsson
> 
> Good thesis (I've just browsed it.)

I agree with you. Very interesting indeed.

> I'm currently looking at how behaviours are defined.
> Personally, I don't like the idea of poking into otp_internal.erl
> in order to define a new behaviour. In practice, this means that 
> users of OTP can't define their own patterns.

Again I agree. That was one of the first thing that stroke me when reading
this text.

> I would like to propose the following:
> 
> - The otp_internal:behaviours() function is simply scrapped.
>   If a module defines a compiler directive -behaviour(B), then
>   B should correspond to the name of the module implementing the
>   behaviour.
> 
> - In each behaviour, export a function B:behaviour_info(Category),
>   for example like this:

You seem to be right. Maybe the OTP people could enlight us on this point, but
it seems to be a good idea.


> (As some of you know, we at AXD 301 also specify our permanent
> processes in the .app file, and let a central start function take
> care of building the supervision hierarchy. The reason for this is 
> to make the process structure more visible.)

Making OTP in general more visible is a good thing. OTP is really improving
your application design, especially thanks to behaviour and should be
advertised.

> A still open issue is whether behaviours which do _not_ want a 
> process should also be allowed? Actually, we have one already:
> application. How would they be defined? Is there a need for 
> additional rules?

Or, maybe we could extend the question ?
Does the application need to be a behaviour or should it be something else ?

Really, I have no answer yet.

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