[erlang-questions] Message Passing over the 'Net

[Bengt Kleberg]

Greetings,

Can you get hold of the book "Programming Erlang"? If so, then chapter
10 Distributed Programming will explain the alternatives.


bengt

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 07:02 -0600, Timothy Baldridge wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm a recent convert to Erlang. I'm still reading up a bit on the
> language, then I plan on trying out some basic "Hello World" apps
> before diving into a more complex program.
> 
> I have a few questions about Erlang's message passing. I understand
> the basic idea behind message passing in Erlang, and how processes can
> be distributed to other physical machines. Is there a way to pass
> messages like this across a rather unsafe medium like the Internet?
> For instance, I'd like to write a client/server app where users can
> login to the main server over the Internet. Both ends of the program
> will be in Erlang. Now I know I could write marshaling routines to
> pack and unpack the data on either end, and shove the packaged data
> over TCP/IP, but it would be much nicer if Erlang had a way that was
> as simple as PID ! message.
> 
> And secondly, if the above is possible, is it possible to encrypt the
> communication by piping it through a SSL connection? I'm sure there
> has to be something like this.
> 
> Thanks for the help, as a big fan of the Python language, let me say
> that Erlang's feature set was what made me decide to switch. Python
> has many bottlenecks, and Erlang, while different, takes care of most
> of these issues.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Timothy
>