[Erlyaws-list] How can i tell YAWS the PID of my gameserver

[ludovic d. <l.d...@la...>]

Hello everybody,

At the first point, i'd like you to forgive my bad english, i'll try to be
readable !

I've been concepting a browser-game since about 4 months, writing on
copybooks, table corners, mall bill, whatever. I'm a PHP developper but
this is just a job, i would like to try something new.

Sice a short week, i've been enyoing erlang, newborn in the functionnal
programming world, and i think erlang+yaws is a good solution for what i
need.

My game would run under a main erlang process, but yaws will not be the
only app which will be connected with the server. I'll build some clients
who will handle transformations on the virtual world of the game.

That's how i plan to handle theese clients :
On startup, my game server will store the PID which have to receive
requests (a binary with id,action_id,action_params) in mnesia, and my
clients will look for this PID at launch (only at launch, then the remind
the PID on their recursion loop).

But i think it is not a good solution for yaws:
Yaws will not be stopped, so it has to know the exact PID at the very
moment it changes. Server could have a downtime, i'll launch another
process to handle requests who receives requests and send back "Hi,
temporary downtime, be patient" with some other informations. Server could
be emergency restarted and have a new PID on startup.

So, in my out(A) functions, i have to know this PID.
How could i do that ?

I dont want annoy you with so noobish questions, i'm young at erlang.
If i register an atom with the PID of my server at his start, the
before-existing atom with the same name will be replaced ?
Is it sufficient that yaws and my server runs on the same VM for yaws
knows the existence of such atom ?
(beacause i've read everywhere that an atom is just an atom.. bu now atoms
can handle PIDs ^^)

Maybe the solution is launching yaws in embedded mode (but he will be down
along with the server at downtime => the web pages, like game
documentation, would be served by another server). And in this case, could
i call the setconf(Gconf, Groups) several time from the same process.

There, i'm not asking for code, only hints, i'm reading all documentation
as i can, but english is hard to me (30 min. to write this :) ).

So, thank you for reading.


Lud

PS: if it's the wrong list to ask such questions, let me know !