Erlang/OTP Forums

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<  Open Telecom Platform (OTP)  ~  What is OTP?

bryan
Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 2:48 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 8
From what I can understand, OTP is a framework for building applications, is this correct? Being new, I'm not really sure what OTP is, whether it's a part of the Erlang interpreter, whether it's a library, whether it's some external program, etc. (Well, I have some idea because I just finished reading a little bit about it, but you can imagine a person who has no idea.)

The real reason for me asking this is because I think we need a wiki page describing OTP, and maybe this thread will bring some ideas together.

So, what is OTP?

Bryan
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Mazen
Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 4:25 pm Reply with quote
User Joined: 20 Jul 2006 Posts: 164 Location: London
Hi Bryan...

OTP Stands for Open Telecom Platform... (Although it now adays don't have much to do with Telecom anymore).

Short version: OTP is a set of Erlang applications that define design principals on how to create other applications, structure them and make them fit into a release.

In other words, OTP consists of
1) Design principals for how to build a release, and
2) Erlang applications to support this principals...

To know more about OTP Design principals go here:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/part_frame.html

To know more about building releases and target systems go here:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/system_principles/create_target.html#3

Using OTP design principals enables the use of any application to simply be included in a release/target thus you can see it as a framework for adding/starting/stopping/upgrading/removing applications with ease.

So, Erlang/OTP is _not_ part of Erlang the language. It makes use of the language to structure the deployment of the targets. When people talk about doing something the "OTP way" they (most likely) mean creating applications that conforms to the OTP Design principals.

OTP _can_ be ignored completely and you can create perfectly running systems that run no matter what their directory structure look like but you miss out on all the tools that help maintain, upgrade and create the releases.

Hope this clears up some of the confusion...

/M
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francesco
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:15 pm Reply with quote
User Joined: 07 Jul 2006 Posts: 249 Location: London
Hi,

Mazen did a pretty good job at describing OTP. An abridged version (and the first slide of the course) would be that OTP consists of three things.
    Erlang
    A set of reusable applications
    A set of design principles
Together, they provide a platform for developing distributed fault tolerant, massively concurrent soft real time systems with high availability requirements.

Regards,
Francesco
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bryan
Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 10:49 am Reply with quote
Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 8
Thank you both for the explanation.
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