Transforming Erlang Server Applications

In Erlang, behaviours serve as specialized design patterns, offering numerous advantages. For example, they allow us to abstract common components when addressing similar problems. Additionally, recognizing design patterns enhances our understanding of software source code by providing structured insights into specific parts and the underlying design decisions. In contrast to object-oriented languages, which have various tools for identifying design patterns, functional programming languages like Erlang have fewer readily available solutions. Our focus is on legacy Erlang systems and their transformation into more readable modern code. Previously we developed a possible method for identifying source code fragments in such systems based on static analysis. In this paper, we propose a method for transforming recognized server candidates into client-server Erlang design patterns. To achieve this, we use the RefactorErl framework to verify the feasibility of the transformation and then transform the code into a generic server process. Our approach is demonstrated through an illustrative examnle.