New Series: LFE OTP Tutorials

This post introduces an new series of tutorials on the LFE blog which will step LFE users through OTP in the style of Lisp Flavoured Erlang.

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

There aren't a lot of OTP tutorials online. One really good one (starts here) is in Fred's most excellent book Learn You Some Erlang for great good!. Other resources include:

• Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang including the chapters "Introducing OTP" and "Making a System with OTP"
• Francesco and Simon's Erlang Programming, Chapter 12
• All of Francesco and Steve's Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP
• Martin, Eric, and Richard's Erlang and OTP in Action, including Chapter 4 and Chapter 8 (among others)

There are bits and pieces in blog posts, documentation, etc., but nothing that really gives a complete picture, is easy to grasp for newcomers, and which keeps the code very clean and clear.

And there is absolutely nothing for LFE.

This series will attempt to alter this landscape somewhat, if only to address the last point. The idea will be to refer readers to these excellent books for in-depth looks into the topics that we cover, but to provide a clear howto for basic concepts and getting started.

We do want to make this an amazing OTP tutorial series, so please leave feedback if you have ideas on how to do that.

The plan as it stands right now is to cover the following, with super-explicit code (no "magical" implicit parameters):

• Creating services with the gen_server behaviour
• How to use the gen_fsm behaviour
• Working with gen_event and notifications
• Using supervisor to create supervision trees
• Creating applications with the application behaviour
• Making a "release" with relx

Depending upon content covered and the size of any give post's draft, these may get split into more than just those six. Watch the skies! Wait for the signal! LFE OTP tutorials are on their way!