Chapter 4. OTP applications and supervision

This chapter covers

  • An introduction to OTP applications
  • Fault tolerance with OTP supervisors
  • Generating documentation with EDoc

The entire purpose of the Erlang/OTP ecosystem is building stable, fault-tolerant systems. We introduced the core concepts of this ecosystem in chapter 3, building a simple RPC server; we now take it further and teach you how to pack this up properly and make it a fault-tolerant, production-quality service. We do this by introducing two new fundamental concepts:

  • Applications are the way you package related modules in Erlang. The focus here isn’t on packaging for distribution but on being able to treat a bunch of modules as a single entity. Although OTP applications can ...

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