[erlang-questions] Complex state machines for complex telnet applications

[Thom Cherryhomes]

Would you, for example, build the ranch protocol as simple as possible, and
link the other application servers, as needed, with a common protocol?

-Thom

On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 2:56 PM Thom Cherryhomes <thom.cherryhomes@REDACTED>
wrote:

> Hello, everyone. This is my first post to the list.
>
>
> I’m a long time swiss army knife of a software and hardware engineer who
> has started to pick up Erlang, because I believe it and languages like it
> to be the future of software development.
>
> With that said, I am working on a personal project of mine that I have
> wanted to complete, a 21st century version of a BBS system, and I believe
> Erlang and OTP are a good language and toolkit to write it in.
>
>
> Code is being dropped here: http://github.com/tschak909/nakbbs
>
>
> I am experimenting with both Ranch and just using gen_tcp with my own
> socket pools, but I do have some design questions.
>
>
> The telnet ports need to present a definite series of states, broken up
> into seperate pieces:
>
>
> I have definite common events that can be stretched across multiple use
> cases:
>
>
> * Display
>
> * Wait for line of input
>
> * Wait for character input
>
> * branch to another menu
>
> * hang up
>
>
> But there will also be definite sections of the system, which could be
> thought of as states:
>
>
> * Authentication
>
> * Message Browser
>
> * Message Editor
>
> * Various Games
>
>
> etc.
>
>
> and I’m trying to think of an appropriate architectural pattern that will
> avoid me basically having to cram every conceivable state as a sort of
> hierarchy of tuples into a single gen_statem module. How can I approach
> this in a nice abstract and extensible manner, that I could for example
> push into a Behaviour and subsequently utilize for different terminal
> types? It would be nice to split up the different parts of the system into
> applications that would essentially be called from well defined APIs…
>
>
> I’m just trying to figure this all out, and would love a semblence of
> direction so I can do the proper research and deeply understand what I need
> to learn.
>
>
> -Thom
>
>
>
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