Server-side network protocol

Erlang's binary pattern matching and finite state machine behaviors make it easy to write network server protocol handlers. At Datometry, we added our own ODBC-driver and corresponding server-side protocol handler to allow our customers to replace ODBC drivers from their previous database vendor. We used Postgres v3 as a starting point. To better understand the protocol, we created a simple server using gen_statem. We'll cover the motivation for building our designing our own network protocol, and the design and implementation details of our prototype server.

OBJECTIVES

Demonstrate the power of binary pattern matching and using a finite state machine to track the protocol state, tying all of the pieces together into a server.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Server-side engineers, Network server developers.