16.6. Library Support for Communication

As the example in the preceding section shows, it is pretty tedious to encode and decode the data yourself. Of course, you have the flexibility to choose efficient communication protocols between your external program and an Erlang node, but reinventing an encoding for each program is not the best way to do things.

If you do not want to go down that route, Erlang comes with libraries to support communication with the outside world, and particularly with C and Java. We covered the Java library at the beginning of the chapter; we’ll discuss interfacing with Ruby in the remainder of the chapter.