The world of enterprise software development has a new face: Erlang. Erlang is a functional programming language with native constructs for concurrency and reliability. In this article, Dennis Byrne provides an introduction to the Erlang programming language and Jinterface, an open source component of Ericsson's Open Telecom Platform. Jinterface gives us the ability to integrate Java and Erlang.

Java and Erlang are not mutually exclusive, they complement each other. I personally have learned to embrace both because very few complex business problems can be modeled exclusively from an object oriented or functional paradigm. The solutions to these problems can be sequential or concurrent. Jinterface can cleanly divide (and conquer) a system into parts suitable for Java and parts suitable for Erlang.

Read Integrating Java and Erlang Editor's Note: Dennis will also be presenting the following session at TSSJS 2008 this March -- Concurrent Programming with Java and Erlang

Great work! Java world really lacks such an articles.

That's very interesting. Does anyone know if the Erlang RPC protocol is publicly available? You would think there would be value in that, to create a market for integrating with Erlang servers. Kit

Yes, Erlang RPC protocol is open. In fact, the whole Erlang interpreter is open :) You can look at the source yourself.

This may be beside the point since it focuses on Erlang, but anyhow... I remember the days when it was considered smart coding to try and work as much logic into a single line of code as possible. Especially C with it pointers allowed for great hacks. One of my collegue students was very adept in this and there was no way I would explain to him the concept of readability. Now, I fully understand that a new language needs some getting used to, but I'm not charmed by the incredible compact notation that Erlang has. Cobol proved that writing in "regular" English is not practical, but writing with just symbols is the other side of the equation. IMHO there is some kind of standarisation happening in the syntax used by programming languages; like {} for blocks, ; for line terminators, [] for lists, | to stream data, etc. Why people keep thinking they know better symbols to use, keeps eluding me. Why is {} better for a list than []? Why is . better than ;? And the compile optimisation for recursion really got me baffeld: in order to apply a endless loop we do a compiler optimisation? rrrrrright. Anyhow, personally I would have chosen something like this for the loop code: loop() { forever { receive() | [From, [First, Second]]; [mathserver, First + Second] | From; } } Well, I'm just rambling.

Tom, Your comments clearly show you don't have even a minimal understanding of neither Erlang nor any other functional language. You simply don't know what a great thing tail-recursion (as a basis of lambda calculus) is. I would even recommend tail-recursion to be added to Java compiler, since it really improves functional programming habit. You don't even know when we use '.' or ';' in Erlang. My advice: get back and read a bit about this (new!) language. Also, if I was in your shoes, I wouldn't have called Prof.Armstrong 'people'.

Very instructive article in fact. Thanks for the links.

Although not java but if anyone is looking for .net and erlang integration can found it on the following url. http://weblogs.asp.net/nleghari/archive/2008/01/08/integrating-net-and-erlang-using-otp-net.aspx

I'm a little late in asking this, but does this mean that something like Yaws could be adapted to be a Servlet container or address the same basic needs?

http://erlyweb.org

ErlyWeb is a component-oriented web development framework that simplifies the creation of web applications in Erlang according to the tried-and-true MVC pattern. ErlyWeb's goal is to let web developers enjoy all the benefits of Erlang/OTP while creating web applications with simplicity, productivity and fun. ErlyWeb is designed to work with Yaws, a high-performance Erlang web server. For more information on Yaws, visit http://yaws.hyber.org.