Building Scalable Applications with ERLANG (Developer's Library)

Erlang is emerging as a leading language for concurrent programming in mission-critical enterprise environments where applications must deliver exceptional reliability, availability, and scalability. It’s already used by organizations ranging from Facebook to Amazon, and many others are adopting or considering it.

As a functional language, however, Erlang is radically different from conventional object-oriented languages like C++ and Java. This book quickly brings experienced object-oriented programmers up to speed with both Erlang and the principles of functional programming. Jerry Jackson thoroughly explains Erlang’s key concepts, principles, and features, bridging the conceptual gaps that often frustrate object developers. Next, he shows how to use Erlang to build massively-scalable real-world systems with up to “nine nines” availability: that is, up to 99.9999999% uptime. Coverage includes:

• What Erlang is, and why it offers so much potentia
• What it means to be “concurrency-oriented, and how to design concurrency-oriented applications
• How to use functional features, pattern matching, and Erlang’s standard libraries
• How to manage concurrency and mutable state, and work with the Mnesia database
• How to write distributed software with Erlang
• How to use powerful additional capabilities built into Erlang’s Open Telecom Platform (OTP)
• How to interact with Java, C, and other languages
• How to use Erlang’s bundled web server and debugger, and much more

Part 1. Introduction

1. What is Erlang and Why is it Important?

2. Erlang is Concurrency-Oriented

3. Concurrency Oriented Design

4. Getting Started

Part 2. Functional Erlang

5. What is a Functional Language?

6. A Simple Erlang Program

7. Erlang Data Types

8. Control Structures and Pattern Matching

9. Higher-Order Programming

10. Standard libraries

11. A Larger Example

Part 3. Concurrency and Mutable State

12. I/O and External State

13. Processes and Messages

14. Links and Monitors

15. Registered Names

16. The Process Dictionary

17. Tables (ETS and DETS)

18. The Mnesia Database

19. Comparing the Different Types of State

Part 4. Distributed Erlang

20. Erlang Nodes and Cookies

21. RPC

22. Global Names and Locks

23. Failover

Part 5. The Open Telecom Platform (OTP)

24. Behaviors

25. Applications

26. Releases

27. Hot Code Updates

28. A Complete Erlang/OTP Application: Tuple Spaces

Part 6. Interacting with Other Languages

29 Java

30. C

Part 7. Bundled Applications

31. Yet Another Web Server (YAWS)

32. The Erlang Debugger

Appendices

Appendix A. Lexical Conventions

Appendix B. Links to More Information