Erlware commons can best be described as an extension to the stdlib application that is distributed with Erlang. These are things that we at Erlware have found useful for production applications but are not included with the distribution. We hope that as things in this library prove themselves useful, they will make their way into the main Erlang distribution. However, whether they do or not, we hope that this application will prove generally useful.
- Generally Useful Code
- High Quality
- Well Documented
- Well Tested
In general the erldocs will describe how to use each module in the application. There is some additional information that is useful, but for the most part it's all there.
We are trying to keep the code base clean, so we only accept code into the application that has proven to be useful in multiple projects over the course of years (generally). This shouldn't be a dumping ground for everything that might be useful in random projects.
Every piece of Erlware code gets peer reviewed by one or more of the core committers (there are four of us at the moment) before it ever makes it into a canonical Erlware repo. We all write Erlang code for a living and care alot about quality. It is our hope that this makes the Erlware Commons code, and Erlware code in general, some of the best out there.
We have some minimal standards for documentation that are required (public apis have to be spec'd and commented). However, it's very difficult to standardize 'well documented'. That's one of the nice places code review comes in. We all have a good feel for what 'well documented' is and we try to make sure that happens for all the code.
For Erlware Commons we have a hard requirement that we get 75% test coverage on every module in the system as reported by the Erlang Cover application. In many modules we have much better coverage, but 75% is the minimum. Things don't go into Erlware Commons without being well tested, period. Again, we hope that this will lead to usable, durable code base.
Dig in, use the code. We hope it's as helpful to you as it is to us. Feel free to contribute back bug fixes, suggestions, issues etc. You can find more information at