We can all agree that building scalable web applications that can handle a high volume of concurrent users is essential for success in today’s digital world. To be honest, these days there’s been an increasing demand for real-time interactions and seamless user experiences, which has been making developers face the challenge of creating applications that not only scale effortlessly but also remain fault-tolerant and reliable under heavy loads. So, I want us to explore how Erlang and OTP can be harnessed to build scalable web applications that can handle massive traffic while maintaining fault-tolerance and reliability.
As software developers, we go through the challenge of building robust web applications, we often stumble upon different programming languages and frameworks offering unique features and ‘promises’. Some try to indulge Javascript and her frameworks, some others go extra. In the light of all these things, the aim is to build web apps that are scalable.
In this blog, I intend to discuss Erlang and OTP, since they’ve been my powerful companion when building web apps that require too much. By the way, OTP means Open Telecom Platform. That said, let’s get on an exciting journey exploring how Erlang and OTP come together as a dynamic duo, enabling us to build web applications that not only handle concurrency like a pro but also sail through the storm of potential failures without losing their balance. So, fasten your seatbelts comrades, let’s dive into the world of scalable web development with Erlang and OTP!
Let’s talk about Erlang, shall we?
To top Erlang engineers, Erlang is described as the “best-kept secret of concurrency,”. In my experience, it is a very powerful programming language with a fascinating history. Speaking of history, it was developed by Ericsson back in the 1980s, Erlang was originally intended to ease the development process of telecommunications applications. He created the language to address the challenges of handling a massive number of concurrent users and maintaining high availability without compromising on performance.
One of Erlang’s unique features lies in its concurrency model, which is heavily influenced by the actor model. Instead of relying on traditional operating system threads, Erlang actually takes a lightweight and more efficient approach by using “processes” as its building blocks.
Gotcha! haha 😀 Okay, okay. So, don’t let the term “process” confuse you with the heavyweight processes used in some other languages. In my experience using Erlang, these processes are incredibly lightweight and consume minimal system resources.
The real magic happens through message passing between these lightweight processes. Imagine a bustling beehive, where bees communicate by passing messages to one another, each working independently while sharing vital information with their peers. Well, in Erlang, these processes communicate through messages, ensuring a clean and isolated flow of data, which significantly simplifies concurrent programming.
Okay, I think I’ve explained Erlang. We should talk about the power of OTP now, right?
Since we’ve got a glimpse of Erlang’s concurrency prowess, let’s talk about OTP, the ‘secret sauce’ that elevates Erlang from being just a programming language to becoming a complete framework for building scalable, fault-tolerant applications.
On the other hand, OTP, which stands for Open Telecom Platform, is not actually limited to telecom applications despite its name’s origin. It’s a comprehensive set of libraries, design principles, and best practices built on top of Erlang. Seeing that OTP provides a structured approach to tackle common challenges faced during application development, such as error handling, distribution, code hot-swapping, and much more makes it even better than advertised.
One of the key components of OTP is the concept of “behaviors.” Behaviors are generic programming patterns that allow you to implement common functionality, like handling client-server interactions, in a standardized way. The most well-known OTP behavior is “gen_server,” which helps developers build robust client-server architectures with ease. In fact, OTP is not just about ‘boilerplate’ code; it also offers powerful abstractions for building fault-tolerant systems. I can assure you that with the help of OTP’s supervision trees, you can design your application to gracefully handle failures. ‘Supervisors’ take care of monitoring the processes and automatically restart them if they crash, ensuring that the application remains stable even in the face of errors.
Well, all I’m just trying to say is that Erlang and OTP complement each other perfectly, providing a robust foundation for building web applications that can handle enormous concurrent traffic while gracefully dealing with any challenges that may come their way. The combination of Erlang’s concurrency model and OTP’s fault-tolerant design principles offers a unique and compelling approach to scalable web development that every developer should explore.