[erlang-questions] jinterface

[Serge Aleynikov]

Last weekend I did implement support for monitoring Erlang pids in 
otp.net.  It seems to work ok, though I see Vlad's point in that it's 
somewhat cumbersome to use Erlang-style message passing in a language 
that doesn't support native concurrency.

I faced another "challenge" being that the IO requests in the form of 
io:format(Fmt, Args) get directed to a group leader in the otp.net node 
as an io_request carrying some {put_chars, io_lib, format, Args} 
content.  The inconvenience is that otp.net node doesn't have any clue 
of how apply that io:format/2 function to format that output.  Is there 
a way to force the evaluation to happen on the Erlang side so that it 
would come to the non-Erlang node as {put_chars, String} of some sort?

Serge

Robert Virding wrote:
> That would be a better solution in the long-run, but it is one which,
> unfortunately, I can't help you with.
> 
> Robert
> 
> 2008/10/4 Serge Aleynikov <saleyn@REDACTED>
> 
>> Ah, I see, this makes sense.  Meanwhile, I looked through the distribution
>> sources, ei, and jinterface and see that it's not that difficult to add some
>> monitoring support for non-Erlang nodes so that they can monitor Erlang
>> pids.  I'll patch otp.net and later ei if I find time this or next
>> weekend.
>>
>> Serge
>>
>>
>> Robert Virding wrote:
>>
>>> It's not the io server which tries to setup a monitor, but the io module
>>> itself. These are two separate but cooperating entities. The io module
>>> monitors the io server to make sure that the call will not block if the
>>> process dies. The easiest way around this is to do the send/receive to the
>>> io serv yourself without a monitor.
>>>
>>> Robert
>>>
>>> 2008/10/4 Serge Aleynikov <saleyn@REDACTED>
>>>
>>>  One other "nasty" feature is that any attempt to make an RPC call of
>>>> io:format/2 from a Java/.NET node fails with badarg, because io server
>>>> tries to set up a monitor to the remote pid and fails miserably...
>>>>
>>>> Actually I see what's missing in Java/OTP.NET implementation.  These
>>>> features are documented here:
>>>> http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_dist_protocol.html#9.7
>>>>
>>>> Serge
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Paul Guyot wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:32:55 -0400
>>>>>> From: Serge Aleynikov <saleyn@REDACTED>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] jinterface (was: otp.net)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I tried a similar test using jinterface to see if it's possible to
>>>>>> monitor processes running on a Java node and ran into the same failure.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Can anyone explain what's wrong?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> (server@REDACTED)10> {test, client@REDACTED} ! {self(), hello}.
>>>>>> {<0.45.0>,hello}
>>>>>> (server@REDACTED)11> f(), {Pid, _} = receive M -> M end.
>>>>>> {<5979.1.0>,hello}
>>>>>> (server@REDACTED)12> erlang:monitor(process, Pid).
>>>>>> ** exception error: bad argument
>>>>>>      in function  erlang:monitor/2
>>>>>>         called as erlang:monitor(process,<5979.1.0>)
>>>>>>
>>>>> I've seen a comment in stdlib/gen.erl, at line 196, that suggests that
>>>>> Java and C nodes are featureweak, and processes in such nodes cannot be
>>>>> monitored. Instead, you have to monitor the whole node with
>>>>> monitor_node/2. This makes sense because the OTP ei (C library) or
>>>>> jinterface do not monitor "processes". Indeed, there is only one pid per
>>>>> node, which is the node's pseudo-pid (even if technically, each
>>>>> connection can receive messages). I guess you can draw from the code in
>>>>> gen.erl if you need to monitor either an erlang process or your java
>>>>> process, or just monitor the node if you only need to monitor java
>>>>> processes.
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>
>>>>> Paul
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>