Time to Hit the Books

Previously

• I started coding up mod_megaphone.
• I had some success with trying to send messages around.
• I created some code to format messages correctly on the ejabberd side.

I think I more or less have identified the entry point into megaphone_http_bind where messages should be sent: that is the process_request function.

And then everything comes to a dead stop.

There is a lot about erlang patterns that I do not know about, and it shows.

For example, I don't understand the following statement:

supervisor:start_child(SupervisorProc, [Sid, Key, IP])


I can parrot the erlang documentation:


Dynamically adds a child specification to the supervisor SupRef which starts the corresponding child process.


But this does not tell me why this approach is being used or what function I can expect to be called in response to this.  At this point, I can continue to blindly grope about, or I can read up on erlang.

For the record, I would prefer to blindly grope around.

I think that in the long run it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with some of the erlang concepts that ejabberd is using, since I will probably run into them again and again.  It just sucks that I have to stop with the coding and hit the books.

So the next step is to read up on what things like supervisor:start_child do.