[erlang-questions] Erlang "jar" file?

[Geoff Cant]

Bernhard Damberger <bernied@REDACTED> writes:

> Does erlang support the idea of an archived collection of compiled code, like
> a jar file? I know that Joe Armstrong wrote a tool called ear that creates
> an archive for stand alone erlang (see http://www.sics.se/~joe/sae.html).
> But I got the impression that this is not supported by the standard erlang
> distribution (or is no longer being actively developed).
>
> All the interpreter really needs to do is to be able to load the .beam files
> in from an archived file (say zip format). So, can it currently do so?
>
> _bernhard

I tried building a zip loader as an exercise and it turned out not to be
too difficult. (http://git.erlang.geek.nz/?p=ssae.git;a=summary)

It probably needs to be taken further so that you can do something like
'erl -s ssae init -s yourmodule init' and only distribute ssae.beam.

It would be good if the people who are interested in SAE to put together
a wiki page detailing what they expect out of SAE - then we could see
how difficult it would be to provide that. My guess is that modifying
the runtime system to load beam files out of a zip section in the
runtime binary would be tricky - but maybe that's not the requirement.

Cheers,
-- 
Geoff Cant