Highlights
Erlang 5.0/OTP R7B

This document points at the most important improvements in Erlang 5.0/OTP R7B. For more detailed information, please check the release notes for the respective applications.

General

Some of the major new features in this version of Erlang/OTP are:

Note also that the Jive application has now been removed.

ERTS-5.0.1

IC-4.0.5

Kernel-2.6.1

STDLIB-1.9.1

Appmon-2.0.1

Asn1-1.2.9.3

Comet-1.0

Comet is a new application.

Comet, a COM client for Erlang, is a way to call any COM-service in Windows from an Erlang program. It's a combination of a gen_server and a port program (or port driver) that enables Erlang programs to call almost any COM-server.

Comet uses a gen_server in the module erl_com, together with a port program (or port driver), to call COM-servers. Both the late-binding interface IDispatch and early-binding virtual interfaces can be used. Erlang types are converted to COM types and parameters are returned.

COM stands for Component Object Model, (or sometimes Common Object Model), and is MicroSoft's technique for component-based programming. It allows programs on Windows systems to call other programs and libraries across language boundaries. It is a competitor to Corba, but has other functionality too.

COM is available on all 32-bit Windows systems, such as NT 4, Windows 95,Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Comet can be used on any of these.

With Comet, an Erlang application can use (almost) any COM-service on
Windows from Erlang. Examples of what can be done include:

Compiler-3.0.1

Inets-2.5.3

Jinterface-1.2

Mnesia-3.9.2

Orber-3.1.8

cosNotification-1.0.2

cosNotification is a new application which implements the CORBA (OMG) Notification service.

cosTime-1.0.1

cosTime is a new application which implements the CORBA (OMG) Time service.

SNMP-3.2.1

Tools-1.6.1