Erlang FFI question

[pj]

Greetings.

I am new to erlang. From what I have learned (Online Erlang book, and some
random tutorials from Net) its very impressive.

I would like to learn about how to interface C libraris and Dll's from
erlang.
What is the preferred method of talking to the 'out side world' ?

I (vaguely) saw some method of spawning a native application and talk to it
with something called 'Ports'. Is that the way to do it? How about calling
shared libraries and dlls?

I believe corba is an option.
Does win32 erlang do COM ?

Appreciate your time.

thanks
pj