Having read Joe Armstrong’s book and watched Kevin Smith screencasts I’ve built a simple OTP application comprised of a single gen_server and single supervisor, bundled together as an OTP application.
Now I’m looking at mochiweb and have created a sample project [helloworld] using the new_mochiweb.erl script. Browsing the source code I see it’s not dissimilar from my sample OTP app [the OTP application is there, the supervisor is there] with one key difference .. the generated helloworld.erl and helloworld_web.erl files don’t implement gen_server behaviour, they are just standard Erlang modules.
I was under the impression that using gen_server was the recommended way to go when building OTP application components. Why might mochiweb use OTP application and supervisor behaviours but eschew gen_server ?
There is a gen_server, called mochiweb_socket_server. The generated modules are only “callback modules” for the gen_server to be called when recieveing an incoming request.