Another short discussion about networks

Before we go further, we should take a moment to talk about networking and more specifically, about network topologies.

Fortunately, OTP doesn't really require us to know a lot about the TCP/IP stack or the OSI model of networking. In fact, OTP abstracts away most of the difficulties with networking—remote calls are identical to local calls. Even if a raw TCP socket is desired, the default mode for the socket will be to marshal the data packets as messages to the controlling process. That is, the OTP process that owns the socket will be given regular messages as TCP data is received.

Topologies

There are several standard topology models that exist today. There is the line, bus, ring, star, tree, mesh, mesh ring, and crossbar topologies.

Knowing the topologies isn't entirely required for building distributed applications. The usefulness of knowing topologies really shows when attempting to optimize network traffic. Furthermore, knowing the layout of nodes...