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Open Telecom Platform

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The OTP distribution is supported and maintained by the OTP product unit at Ericsson, who released Erlang/OTP as open-source in the late 1990s, to ensure its independence from a single vendor and to increase awareness of the language.

It contains:

  • an Erlang interpreter (which is called BEAM);
  • an Erlang compiler;
  • a protocol for communication between servers (nodes);
  • a CORBA Object Request Broker;
  • a static analysis tool called Dialyzer;
  • a distributed database server (Mnesia); and
  • many other libraries.

History

Early days

Originally named Open System, it was started by Ericsson in late 1995 as a prototype system that aimed to select from a range of appropriate programming technologies and system components, including computers, languages, databases and management systems, to support a remote access system being developed at Ericsson. In the same year, following the collapse of another gigantic C++-based project, Open System was ordered to provide support when it restarted from scratch using Erlang. The result was the highly successful AXD301 system, a new ATM switch, announced in 1998. Open System was later named Open Telecom Platform (OTP) when the first prototype was delivered in May 1996. OTP has also become a specific product unit within Ericsson since then, providing management, support and further development.

The early OTP system components in 1998:

  • Distributed application management
  • SASL - error logging, release handling
  • OS resource monitoring
  • EVA - protocol independent event/alarm handling
  • Mnesia - real-time active data replication
  • SNMP - operations and maintenance interface
  • INETS - simple HTTP support

A key subsystem in OTP is the System Architecture Support Libraries (SASL), which gave a framework for writing applications. The early version of SASL provided:

  • Start-up scripts
  • An application concept
  • Behaviours (design patterns)
  • Error handling
  • Debugging
  • High-level software upgrade in runtime without shutdown

The behaviours provide programmers with yet higher abstractions for efficient program design. The early version included:

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