Erlang Solutions in the UK

Erlang Solutions's headquarters are based in the city of London, just opposite Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane. From their offices, they host their scheduled training courses and user group meetings as well as managing their professional services and research and development projects.

Our services include:


Our office is located in London's financial district, at walking distance from Liverpool Street, Aldgate and Aldgate East tube stations. For directions, Click the map on the right.


29 London Fruit & Wool Exchange
Brushfield Street
London, E1 6EU
United Kingdom


Tel: INT+44 - (0) 20 - 7456 10 20
Fax: INT+44 - (0) 870 - 1390 779


Our Next Scheduled Courses in the UK:

United Kingdom
Erlang OTP Express (Three days - 950 GBP)
Date: 07-June-2010. City: London, UK.
Erlang Express (Three days - 950 GBP)
Date: 07-June-2010. City: London, UK.
Erlang By Example (Five days - 1350 GBP)
Date: 22-November-2010. City: London
Erlang Open Telecom Platform (Five days - 1350 GBP)
Date: 29-November-2010. City: London

If you need a course in an area not listed here or for a larger group of people, please contact us. An option is to order consulting and training services adapted to your needs (Migration, Code Review, and Prototype Packages), where we use our training material in conjunction with your project requirements. We are here for you!


Upcoming Events in the UK

11 March 2010:
Erlang User Group Meeting at QCon London 2010 (London,UK)
Join us at the Erlang User Group Meeting at QCon London 2010! The meeting will be  held on March 11, 18.30 - 20:30 in Rutherford, The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Broad Sanctuary, Westminster, London SW1P 3EE.

That's an excellent opportunity to interact with Francesco Cesarini, Ulf Wiger, Justin Sheehy and Joe Armstrong! Come along learn, listen, debate, shape, join in, share experiences, exchange ideas and network.
  • Francesco Cesarini presents "Erlang community around the world"
  • Ulf Wiger talks about "Erlang in the Clouds"
  • Justin Sheehy will present "Introduction to RIAK" &
  • Joe Armstrong talks about "Erlang Libraries"
Everyone is welcome (even if you do not participate in QCon London 2010).  In order to attend this free event, you just have to register here.

Don't miss out four Erlang talks during one evening!

   



12 March 2010:
QCON London 2010 (London, UK)
The fourth annual London enterprise software development conference - QCON 2010 - is back. The event is designed for team leads, architects and project management. It gathers Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile, Erlang and architecture communities. QCON 2010 will be held in London from 8th till 12th March 2010.

Erlang Solutions Ltd. will be present at QCON 2010.  On Friday, 12th March 2010 Ulf Wiger (our CTO) will be hosting the Concurrency Challenge track. He will also give an introductory talk The Concurrency Challenge at 10:20 and a presentation on Death by accidental complexity at  4:30 pm.

Abstract The Concurrency Challenge track
By now "The free lunch" ended more than five years ago; server core counts are ranging from 8 to 864, and yet the concurrency revolution has still to occur: concurrent programming is not yet mainstream. As in-process concurrency is gaining importance three methodologies are competing for programmer adoption: classic locks, transactional memory and share-nothing actors. This track aims to push this revolution forward by giving an overview of techniques and methodologies that can make efficient and correct(!) concurrent programming mainstream. Programming languages have an important role here in providing programming models and compiler support to deal with complexity and efficiency issues. Hence, important programming language concurrency models are covered as well as more basic concurrency problems and solutions. Prepare to be surprised and amazed!

Abstract Death by accidental complexity
Coordination of dependent activities is a particularly nasty concurrency domain, since the wrong design choices can easily lead to complexity explosion. In sufficiently interesting applications, this will quickly become the dominating challenge - but if we are not trained to recognize the disease and know the cure, we may not even realise what is killing our project. This presentation will demonstrate how even a very basic program can push us towards the brink of insanity. Fortunately, an antidote will also be presented.

 See you there!


Tutorials: March 8-9, 2010
Conference:  March 10-12, 2010

When registering for the QCon, use the Discount Code "erlangug" and save  £50 off the price!

17 April 2010:
ACCU 2010: Styling your Architecture in an Evolving Concurrent World and Message-Passing Concurrency in Erlang (Oxford, UK)
ACCU 2010 will take place from 14 to 17 April 2010 at the Barcelo Oxford Hotel, in Oxford, UK. The programme of the conference will feature a special track on software testing, and sessions on concurrent and distributed systems, C++, Java, agile development and Erlang!


Francesco Cesarini (founder of Erlang Solutions Ltd.) and Ulf Wiger (CTO of Erlang Solutions Ltd.) will be speaking there. Francesco's talk will be on Styling your Architecture in an Evolving Concurrent World and Ulf's on Message-Passing Concurrency in Erlang.

Abstract: Styling your Architecture in an Evolving Concurrent World
This talk will look at the most common architecture patterns in Erlang-based products, describing how each of them solves a particular problem while guaranteeing no single points of failure. It will start with the early versions of the AXD301 switch and end with examples of the use of Erlang in cloud computing architectures.

Abstract: Message-Passing Concurrency in Erlang
In this talk, I will describe the principles behind Erlang-style Concurrency - what problems it was designed to solve, and how it fundamentally changes the way you go about structuring your programs. I will illustrate how to achieve great scalability on multicore and in compute clouds, without sacrificing clarity or your own sanity.


Meet us at ACCU 2010!



Past Events

17 February 2010:
QuickChecking Refactoring Tools and Exploring Tracing (London User Group Talk, UK)
In February we have prepared for you another very interesting Erlang User Group Meeting. During one evening you will have opportunity to listen to two talks: “Exploring Tracing”  and “QuickChecking Refactoring Tools”. They will be given by Hungarian students who are currently doing some projects at the University of Kent.

The meeting will take place on 17th February 2010 at 18:30 in Erlang Solutions' meeting room on the 1st floor of the Fruit and Wool Exchange. For directions, visit our Contact page.

In order to attend this free event, you have to register here, as places are limited!

Biography Judit Kõszegi
 
Judit Kõszegi is a final-year MSc student at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. She won a 5-month scholarship for studying at the University of Kent, and there she works as a researcher from September 2009 to February 2010. In Hungary she is a member of a project-group dealing with the analysis of F# programs; in Canterbury she engaged in the topic of Erlang tracing and debugging.
 
Abstract
 
Existing tools for tracing and debugging in Erlang provide only severely limited interactive trace exploration. The talk will be about a tool that provides free navigation through the trace, so we can explore the generated trace events independent of the time arrow, concentrating on casual relationships instead. Processes are at the heart of any Erlang system, thus we will focus on them instead of function definitions and try to localise faults up to purely functional code. Presentation slides from Judit's talk can be found here.
 
 

Biographies Dániel Horpácsi and Dániel Drienyovszky (joint talk)
 
Dániel Horpácsi is a MSc student at Eötvös Loránd University, where he has dealt with Erlang and refactoring for more than two years as a member of the RefactorErl project (http://plc.inf.elte.hu/erlang). Currently he is studying in Canterbury as an erasmus student and works on this research topic as his master thesis under the supervision of Simon Thompson.
 
Dániel Drienyovszky is a MSc student at the Eötvös Loránd University, currently doing a research project, testing Wrangler, as an erasmus student at the Univeristy of Kent under the supervision of Simon Thompson.
 

Abstract
 
Refactorings are behaviour preserving transformations of program source code. Many tools exist for automating large parts of refactoring steps, but these tools are often poorly tested. We present a method for testing Wrangler, an Erlang refactoring tool, using Quviq's Quickcheck.
 
As the input for the refactoring tools is Erlang source code, to generate random test data we should create a large number of data generators that describe the Erlang language and generate random Erlang source code. This talk will demonstrate a better solution: we will introduce a metalanguage above the QuickCheck generators, which provides an easy way to create generators from L-Attributed Grammar descriptions. We will also present a way to test a large subset of Erlang for behavioural equivalence.  Presentation slides from these talks are available here.

04 February 2010:
Erjang - a JVM-based Erlang VM (London User Group Talk, UK)
Join us for London  Erlang  User Group meeting on Thursday,  4th  February 2010. Our guest will be Kresten Krab Thorup, CTO of Trifork. Kresten will talk about Erjang -  a JVM-based virtual machine for Erlang. That's a  very controversial topic both in Erlang and Java communities - you  cannot miss this talk!

The meeting will be held in Erlang Solutions' meeting room on the 1st floor of the Fruit and Wool Exchange. For directions, visit our Contact page. Be there at 18.00 for an 18.30 start.

In order to attend this free event, you have to register. Registering allows us to plan refreshments accordingly, provide security with a list of names and ensure we have enough space. Register here, as places are limited!

Abstract 
Over the last few years, I have been meeting "Erlang people" more and more often, and I was getting this clear impression that "you people" have some kind of magic ability to reason intuitively about concurrent systems in a way that I could not.  That bothered me, so I wanted to learn Erlang.  Being a language implementor, the most obvious way to do that is to just go ahead and implement an Erlang VM, right?

The result of this "little exercise" is Erjang, an open-source JVM-based Erlang VM.   In technical terms, Erjang reads .beam files and compiles them to Java's equivalent .class files which are then read into the running JVM.  It runs off a plain Erlang/OTP distribution - it only requires the beam files from there; Erjang itself is written in Java.  As off this writing, it can run some non-trivial erlang programs, but is not yet capable of booting OTP [follow updates on my blog http://javalimit.com].  Comparing the BEAM virtual machine and Erjang, the most obvious differences are that (a) Erjang will not be able to provide [soft] real-time guarantees since it uses Java's garbage collector, and (b) it has limited support for native code and port drivers (other than file and network I/O).  The upside is the new ways this allows us to deploy Erlang systems.

In this technical presentation I will talk about how Erjang is implemented, the challenges in mapping Erlang's language constructs to the Java platform, and what behavior to expect from Erlang programs running on top of Erjang.  At this point in time, Erjang is still not usable as a replacement for BEAM, but I can demo some samples, and show status for booting OTP. 

Biography

Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company (trifor.co) providing software solutions to government and financial services providers.  Trifork is also creator of the long-running JAOO conference, and co-creator of QCon.  As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical strategy in customer solutions, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for JAOO and QCon conferences.  Kresten has also been a principal contributor to Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where he authored the built-in CORBA ORB, a custom Java RMI implementation (now part of Apache Yoko), the transaction manager, the database connection management system, and the Java byte code rewriting subsystem.

Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko.  Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system.  Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. 

Most recently, Kresten has founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine. 

If you want to download the presentation slides, you can do this by clicking here.


03 February 2010:
Tutorial: Practical Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini (London, UK)
On Wednesday, 3rd February 2010 in London  Francesco Cesarini, the author of 'Erlang Programming'  also the founder and CSO of Erlang Training and Consulting Ltd. will give a tutorial on Practical Erlang Programming.

The tutorial covers the basic, sequential and concurrent aspects of the Erlang programming language. You will learn the basics of how to read, write and structure Erlang programmes. The target audience are software developers and engineers with an interest in server side applications and massively concurrent systems.

The goal of tutorial is a hands-on introduction to the theory and concepts behind sequential and concurrent Erlang programming, explaining the Erlang syntax, semantics and concurrency model. We conclude with an overview of the error handling mechanisms used to build fault tolerant systems with five nines availability.

The tutorial will take place in the Caesar Room, Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB.

To learn more about the tutorial, please go here and if you want to book it click here.


19 January 2010:
Hypernumbers (London User Group Talk, UK)
After the Christmas and New Year's break, we would like to invite you to our first London Erlang User Group meeting in 2010. This will take place on Tuesday, 19th January 2010 at 18:30 in the Erlang Solutions (formerly Erlang Training and Consulting) meeting room on the 3rd floor of the London Fruit and Wool Exchange in Brushfield street. For directions, visit our Contact page.

The meeting will be dedicated to Hypernumbers with their CEO/CTO Gordon Guthrie as Speaker.

The meeting will be followed by beer, softdrinks and snacks. Admission is free but advance registration is required. Registration allows us to plan refreshments, provide the building entrance desk with a list of names and to ensure we have enough space. Register soon, as places are limited!

Abstract:
Hypernumbers is in the business of end-user computing on the web - providing the toolset for ordinary, non-technical users to ‘programme the internet’. The programming interface '’ooks like a spreadsheet’ and the programme is bound to a standard web front-end with an intuitive GUI-builder.

Using it end users are able to:
* come to a website
* select a pre-built website template
* provision it on a cloud-based server
* customise it

This talk will look at some of the technical details of how it is implemented.

Biography
Gordon Guthrie is the CEO/CTO of hypernumbers an early stage start-up. He has previously worked at senior positions in retail financial services, having been Chief Technical Architect at Intelligent Finance during its launch when it secured 10.4% of the UK retail mortgage market and IT Strategist at Direct Line Financial Services. He has also had senior positions in professional services, including BT Global Professional Services.


25 November 2009:
Strengthen Your Business 2009 (Medway, UK)
More than 50 representatives from the business world attended a special networking event at the University of Kent’s Medway campus.  Called Strengthen Your Business, the free session on 25 November gave business leaders the chance to explore how their companies can team up with the University, and benefit from its commercial expertise and resources.

A variety of business people who had successfully worked with the University on student placements or Knowledge Transfer Partnerships spoke of their experiences, while others outlined the opportunities for collaboration in graduate recruitment and continuing professional development schemes. There was also the chance for individuals to network after the main talks.

Marcus Taylor, Chief Executive for London-based Erlang Training and Consulting, spoke of the strategic help his company had received with Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – a government-funded initiative that helps businesses develop their competitiveness, productivity and performance. ‘I’m not an experienced bid writer, but the University has a wealth of experience in this area and supported us wonderfully throughout the whole process – so much so that we’re thinking of applying for our fourth project,’ he said.

               

James Corbin, Placement Officer for the University of Kent, said it was a golden opportunity for businesses to find out about the resources on their own doorstep. 'The University is host to a wealth of knowledge that can often provide businesses with the solutions they seek,’ he said. ‘We’re convinced that firms who work with the University can gain a competitive edge.’

The event followed hot on the heels of the launch of the University’s ICE initiative, which took place at the Canterbury Innovation Centre on 17 November. ICE stands for innovation, creativity and enterprise, and is a project that aims to connect local, regional, national and international businesses to the University of Kent and to each other.

The Strengthen Your Business event at Medway was run in partnership with Thames Gateway Chamber of Commerce.

For more events please go to Events Page