This is a Tcl extension that will allow software written
in Tcl and Erlang to communicate using the
Erlang/OTP interface, erl_interface.
Erlang provides two native interfaces that enable communication between Erlang processes and external programs using Erlang's message passing mechanism.
One of these interfaces is erl_interface, which allows the external
program to register as a node in a Distributed Erlang network and exchange
messages with Erlang processes.
Some of the aims of the Tcl extension are:
- Let a Tcl application use Erlang for processing.
- Let an Erlang application use a Tcl/Tk based GUI, or other Tcl extensions such as Expect.
The initial version will only expose enough erl_interface functions to
allow a Tcl application to communicate with Erlang nodes. Currently,
there are many functions in erl_interface, however, only the following
subset will be provided:
- register with epmd as a node
- send/receive messages
- decode/encode between internal and Tcl types
You will need the following software/packages:
- Tcl/Tk 8.5 or higher
- Erlang/OTP, R15B03 or higher
- TeX, if producing the documentation
- Cweb can be obtained from here
- cmake
- ccmake, not mandatory, but a useful tool for editing cmake parameters
- make
- C compiler, GCC was used during development
Once you have the source files on a local disk, change to the etclface
directory, then
mkdir -pv build # for out-of-source builds
cd build
cmake ..
make
The documentation is a single PDF file, it can be generated with
make doc
if make is successful, then you should have a libetclface.so file in
the build directory. You can then install the library:
make install # ensure you have permissions
The software has been tested on Debian GNU/Linux only.
The test scripts are can be found in the Tests directory.
Comments and feedback are welcome, please use the issue tracker for this.
Please use pull requests for patch contributions.
Enjoy!
Fred Youhanaie