OTP Express

Target Audience: This course is aimed at experienced Erlang Software Developers and Designers who need to understand Behaviours.
Prerequisites: Existing experience using Sequential and Concurrent Programming with Erlang on projects.
Objectives:
• Use existing Design Patterns supported by Erlang and OTP.
• Apply Generic Behaviours, Finite State Machines and Event handler Patterns.
• Use the Supervisor and Applicaton Behaviours Patterns.
• Write your own Design Patterns.
• Structure large Erlang based systems.
Goal: Design fault-tolerant systems.
Duration: Three days
Registration: 08:30 on 27th April 2009 at the Sheraton Palo Alto.
Description: You will learn the prevailing Erlang Design Patterns called OTP Behaviours. We will cover Erlang Design Patterns such as Generic Behaviours, Finite State Machines and Event Handlers. You will also learn how to develop systems using the Supervisor and Application Behaviours Patterns, so you can construct maintainable and fault tolerant software. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to extend it all, by devising your very own Behaviours.

Course Contents:

• Introduction
  
• Records and Funs
  
• Behaviours
  
• Generic Servers
  
• Finite State Machines
  
• Supervisors
  
• Event Handlers
•  Applications
  
• Special Processes
• System Principles
  
• System Architecture Support Library
  

 Introduction
This section introduces the need and advantages of using middleware in the developmentof massively concurrent, distributed, fault tolerant real time systems in Erlang. It looks at Erlang's evolution, and how it helped form OTP. Further this gives an overview of the components that make up OTP. They are Erlang, a set of behaviours, and rules and design principles to use them. OTP comes with many ready built applications and tools useful for large scale software design. They are introduced in this section.

Records and Funs
Records and funs are used extensively within OTP and a refresher of the concepts and use is provided in this section.

Behaviours
Erlang processes display similar properties. In the Open Telecom platforms, these properties have been abstracted in a group of generic library modules, also called OTP behaviours. This section introduces the concept of behaviours, and through examples of abstraction, shows their need and advantages.

Generic Servers
Generic servers implement the Client-Server behaviours in OTP. This section introduces the most commonly used behaviour in Erlang based applications.

Finite State Machines
The finite state machines behaviour in Erlang is used to implement state transitions in processes based on incoming events. This behaviour is commonly used when implementing protocol stacks.

Supervisors
Supervisors are a behaviour whose only task is to start other Erlang behaviours and monitor them for abnormal termination. This is a vital section in understanding start and restart strategies in Erlang.

Event Handlers
Erlang has ready built event managers. Event handlers are behaviours who subscribe to events sent to specific managers, allowing several actions to take place based on one single event. Event handlers can be changed on the fly, as well as added or deleted from a specific manager.

Applications
This section introduces the application behaviour, used for packaging Erlang resources. Resources can vary from libraries to process clusters, and can be configured to run on a single processor or be distributed on a set of nodes.

Special Processes
There will be times where we want to implement our own behaviours, or for efficiency reason, use simple Erlang processes. This section looks behind the scenes on how behaviours are implemented, and explains how to implement your own.

System_Principles
The System Principles section describes how Erlang applications are coupled together in a release and started as a whole. Sections include creating release files, bundling up the software including the virtual machine, and running Erlang on target and embedded hosts.

System Architecture Support Library
The System Architecture Support Library was used in the first release of OTP to package tools needed for large scale software design. This section covers error logging, the report browser, alarm handler and overload module.

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Teacher(s):

Jan Henry Nystrom

Jan Henry Nyström has been using Erlang for well over a decade. Having come in contact with it at Uppsala University in the late nineties, he started his PhD developing a tool that could automatically extract and formally analyze the supervision structure of an Erlang/OTP application from the source code.

In 2002, he became a research associate at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. There, he was able to re-implement existing distributed Motorola applications written in C++ to Erlang. His research resulted in the publication of numerous papers and journal entries. In 2006, he joined Erlang Solutions as a Research and Training manager. His involvement is not only with training and research. He has kept his knowledge and experience up to date by being involved as an Erlang/OTP consultant and lead developer in many high profile projects.