Behaviors

In Erlang, a behavior is a design pattern implemented in a module/library. It provides functionality in a fashion similar to inheritance in object-oriented programming or interfaces in Java. A number of callback functions must be defined for each behavior to work.

Examples of behaviors are:

• client-server
• event-handler
• gen-server :gen_server
• hot-standby
• keep-me-alive
• supervision-tree
• upgrade-handler
• worker-supervisor

A behavior can be activated with the following code (note: you can use "behavior" instead, if you feel American):

-behaviour(gen_server).