Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. OTP – A Poor Name for a Rich Framework

In the previous chapter, we started our journey down concurrent programming with Elixir, but we certainly wrote a lot of similar code and didn't really get very far. This is all about to change; enter OTP.

Open Telecom Platform (OTP) is a framework originally developed as part of Erlang in the early beginnings of Erlang, and its takeover of the telephone networks. It has grown rapidly outward into a general purpose library for creating Erlang and consequentially, Elixir applications.

OTP provides a set of basic ideas and principles for our processes that will guide us in the right direction. These include OTP applications, (process) supervision trees, server processes, event processes, and special processes.