chp 6

This chapter discusses building applications, specifically about the implementation of supervisors in OTP. Amongst the five behaviors mentioned in the chapter, I think the supervisor behavior is the most important of all five. The hierarchical manner in which the system is built makes it easier to develop new releases. The supervision of worker nodes by the supervisor holds some aprallels with other parallel programming languages that I have worked on. The generic_server API and the server example presented later in the chapter make it easier for us to understand the initail process especially about how exactly the arguments and function calls are used to implement the gen_server. The Event manager principles are interesting and I especially liked the description of how the event manager is like a generalized finite state machine. The application developed to illustrate the finite state machine API is useful to help understand the uses of the packet assembler. The application APi has been described in a clear and concise fashion, and the example serves to help us understand the primitive behaviors. From the discussion it is clear that systems built using OTP behaviors have a systematic structure. Overall this chapter was a very interesting read, and gave insights into how such systems can be put into practice.