What is OTP?

This post is a prelude to the LFE OTP tutorial series which attempts to clarify the role of OTP as something above and beyond a programming language, a set of libraries, or a framework.

LFE OTP Tutorial Series

• Introducing the LFE OTP Tutorials
• What is OTP?
• Prelude to OTP
• Creating LFE Servers with OTP, Part I
• Creating LFE Servers with OTP, Part II
• Distributed LFE

You can leave feedback for the LFE OTP tutorials here.

Pattern Languages

The term pattern language was coined by architect Christopher Alexander, covered in detail in his 1977 book A Pattern Language, where he wove together themes of architecture, urban design, and community livability. The idea of a pattern language was applied to software and entered the collective consciousness of the programming world the in the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

A pattern language is a method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise. What brings a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace to this field? What precise and empirically verifiable generalizations can be made with regard to recurring themes in this field? A pattern language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom underlying the answers to these questions through a set of interconnected expressions arising from that wisdom.

OTP as a Pattern Language

In essence, OTP is a pattern language: one for building fault-tolerant, distributed systems. That’s easy enough to say, and many languages or frameworks say similar things about their own work. But what does this really mean? What is wholeness from the perspective of OTP? What is the spirit of OTP? What makes an OTP application graceful? What wisdom has been extracted from these? What interconnected expression arose from that wisdom?

Though we could point to various behaviours, ways of managing state, excellent uses of pattern matching and LFE records, macros, etc., or share stories of the accumulated hard-won experiences of Erlang engineers – all in an effort to answer these questions, it would actually be more meaningful for you to discover this yourself in the coming posts.

Note that we are not shirking our tutorial responsibilities in making that statement. Quite the contrary! In the course of working through these tutorials, you will gain the actual joys of OTP’s elegance. By the time you have finished these LFE exercises, giving them due time and consideration, you will be able to answer all of these questions from your own direct experience.

Lest we leave you adrift in too much poetry and promises, we will say the following right now: OTP as a pattern language attempts to provide encoded wisdom for the programmer who wishes to create stable, highly-concurrent, fault-tolerant distributed systems. The OTP pattern language is a combination of such things as:

• Behaviours - these are the core patterns in the OTP pattern language, embodying lessons-learned in building concurrent systems
• Programming Style - common idioms shared across a community of developers
• Best practices - how to connect one or many behaviour implementations in one or more deployable applications.

OTP behaviours include the following:

• Workers (gen_server, gen_fsm, gen_event)
• Supervisors (used for building supervision trees)
• Applications (collections of supervisors and workers and their subsequent supervision trees in combination with the means to effectively manage them)

We will cover programming style and best practices in each LFE example we go over.

Up Next

The next post will whet your OTP appetite with some example code some simple servers created in the LFE edition of Casting SPELs in Lisp. Each example is cumbersome in its own right and will help motivate finding a better way to create long-running processes.