Developers at Lindenbaum have released a Maven plugin for Erlang/OTP applications as an open source software for the developer community. Using this plug-in, Maven, which has since become the standard tool used by Java developers for software project management, is now accessible to the Erlang community.

The project is a revision and further refinement of the 'maven-erlang' from Paul Guyot and Olivier Sambourg. Erlang is a high-performance programming language which is commonly associated as being an operating system rather than a programming language. It was particularly important that the plug-in supported concepts such as continuous integration, the administration of dependencies, testing and release packaging - all of which play a significant role in efficient Erlang development.

The Maven plug-in from Lindenbaum forms part of 12 years of development in Erlang: Erlang was developed in 1987 by the mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson and was published as an open source software in 1998. The plug-in is available as a download from sourceforge.net.

When speaking of Erlang, one is often not only referring to the relatively compact process-oriented programming language, but a middleware used for the construction of shared and high-availability systems. For example, Erlang can be used to faultlessly execute and coordinate parallel operating processes, which, when used in technical scenarios with shared server systems, can ensure a high margin of error. The modules of a system can be exchanged without disrupting its overall operation, thereby maintaining high system availability. Moreover, the resource-saving implementation of processes in Erlang enables the building of highly-scalable systems. Thus Erlang can be used to develop robust and  massively scalable soft real-time systems which meet the high requirements of carriers and conference service providers.

The name Erlang is formed by a combination of Ericsson and Language and is a reference to the Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang (1878–1929).
More information on Erlang can be found at www.erlang.org

An interesting side-note: Erlang Shen is the name of a Chinese God with a third truth-seeing eye in the middle of his forehead.