Simuladores em Erlang, ideia geral

Camadas em software podem ser implementadas para flexibilizar e melhorar o feedback loop durante o desenvolvimento de sistemas que interagem com hardware. Estas camadas podem ser simuladores nos quais, quando ativados, interceptam as chamadas de determinada camada roteando para as APIs simuladas.

O seguinte paper apresenta a ideia geral e motivos do uso de simuladores para desenvolvimento de projetos que interagem com hardware: Erlang Embedded Simulation Thesis Report, segue o abstract do paper:

The goal of this thesis is to develop simulators for device drivers and to create and describe a work flow for developing on Erlang Embedded using simulators. The motivation is that frequently testing code on hardware is inconvenient, takes time and only is possible if you have access to the hardware. By simulating simple device drivers like serial ports, buttons and led, this thesis aims to prove that a better development environment can be created. A development work flow describes how the current work flow with Erlang Embedded can be improved by using simulators. The idea is that you should be able to switch between real hardware and simulated mode by just changing an environment variable and providing necessary configuration files. No changes in code are required. A recorder tool was developed to support simulation of devices that generate data such as sensors. The recorder can also be used to quickly create a simulator replaying data traffic that have been recorded from an application previously. Taking advantage of dbg module, the recorder captures messages that a process receives or sends off without any modification to the source code. Using the recorder tool, no API or application logic is needed to simulation a sensor. The thesis was conducted at Chalmers University of Technology under supervision of Erlang Solutions Ltd. Erlang Embedded Simulation is available at Github (https://github.com/EmbeddedErlang/Embedded-Erlang-Simulation) and is licensed under: Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html).

Segue video de uma palestra sobre o tema apresentado pelos autores da tese:

• code
• simulation