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I'm in a group at work reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate and we are having a presentation on one language each week. I'm partially responsible for Erlang in 2 weeks and am looking for a good demo app that would show off the strengths of Erlang. I plan to go through the programming exercises in the book, but am looking for that little, interesting app for the demo. I will need to be able to write it in just a few hours once I become more familiar with the language. Any suggestions are welcome.

digitaljoel
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    wondering why the close votes on this. Other calls for demo apps such as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5311342/r-demos-for-presentation and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4098544/looking-for-a-demo-project-to-present-maven have no close votes, and the R one is actually quite popular. – digitaljoel Mar 17 '11 at 22:00
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    here's what I ended up doing http://digitaljoel.nerd-herders.com/2011/03/31/erlang-concurrency-demo-application/ – digitaljoel Apr 01 '11 at 04:26
  • You might want to consider adding a link to the demo you chose as an answer to your own question and accept it. – Adam Lindberg May 25 '11 at 07:23

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I ran a neat demo at Dyncon in Stockholm last weekend: https://gist.github.com/854389

It's a "virus" that jumps between connected nodes (which the attendees start on their machines and connect to the presenter's already "infected" node).

It demos distribution very nicely. To complement, I started up an Erlang shell and spawned over a million idle processes (that waited in a receive loop), printing every thousand process number to the shell, until my laptop ran out of memory. Very nice effect. :-)

Adam Lindberg
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  • That looks cool. We will only have one machine we are demonstrating on, so it might be difficult to do the virus one, but it gets the wheels turning. – digitaljoel Mar 18 '11 at 20:32
  • It is also possible to bring up, for example, four Erlang shells on the screen (tell the audience that it is four "servers") and then connect them one by one. It's a nice effect. – Adam Lindberg Mar 28 '11 at 10:13
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If you want you can take a look at eirc. It is more of an IRC library but it is a compliant OTP app. Easy to understand and to use and build on (example in the README file) so I think it would be good for a first project.

You can find it here: https://github.com/mazenharake/eirc

Mazen Harake
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I ended up writing an answer to Project Euler's problem 22 in order to show some of the list functions, then I came up with a concurrency app on my own which was pretty well received. Thanks Adam and Mazen for the thoughts.

digitaljoel
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