As an small aside, working w/ Azure Storage would be easier if it supported standard HTTP Authentication (i.e. Basic and Digest). This would require support for MD5 encryption, but that is easier to handle than SHA 256 (see http://sacharya.com/?p=22 for a straight forward implementation).
 

Actually, I've found the Erlang documentation to be both plentiful and generally excellent; you just need to coax Google into cooperation by augmenting queries with e.g. "site:erlang.org inurl:doc".

Once you have the basics down, the library man pages (also accessible via erl -man [page]) are very useful.

http://www.erlang.org/doc/man_index.html

Fortunately it's easy enough to construct the URLs by hand:

http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/[module].html
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/lists.html
 

Maybe these old SHA patches will help you?

I also agree with the comment that Erlang documentation is plentiful. Just keep a tab open to the Erlang man pages and you're golden.

Finally, many n00bs complain about the syntax being old or crufty, but in actuality it's simple. There are so few syntactical variations in the language that the syntax quickly becomes trivial as you write more code. I'd take Erlang syntax over just about anything.
 

@Steve - thanks, I saw these patches too ( i referred to them in my mail to erlang-questions). However, they make it hard for me to distribute my code (since this is essentially a client library for others to use). I think I'm starting to agree with you on the syntax - I'm actually beginning to enjoy it more now

@Christian - thanks for the tip! Actually, I was talking not of the straight doc/man pages but about blog posts, mailing list questions et. al. I find things a lot easier in more 'mainstream' languages. However, I'm sure this is just a function of time - I remember Python and Ruby being the same a few years ago

@mamund - I'm not sure how secure that would be (since md5 is pretty weak and conflicts are known to exist). Also, both would require the use of SSL which is also a problem
 

@Steve - btw, I'm a big fan of your blog and learnt quite a bit of Erlang from it. I'm super thrilled to see you here :)
 

@Sriram: I'm glad you find my blog useful. Maybe you'll find this useful too. :-)
 

I understand about collision issues w/ MD5. SHA-1 is not w/o problems and is still in use, too. Its good to see the use of SHA-2 gaining ground. While fixing HTTP Auth is out-of-scope for Azure Storage, I think building a service which has the greatest reach should be a primary goal. Custom authentication bound up w/ request-signing is, IMO, not a positive response to the limits of MD5.

Also, I appreciate the Azure team's efforts to secure content. I think request-signing is an excellent way to protect *servers* from attacks. I suggest the best way to accomplish data security is through TLS.

Finally, thanks again for continuing to post your examples. They are very instructive and an excellent way to test out the 'portability' of Azure storage.
 

@Steve - wonderful! I took your code and implemented hmac on top of it. I'll clean this up and post it tomorrow. I hope you don't mind your module lyring around in my github repo
 

@Sriram: I'm glad you can use the code, do with it whatever you like. If there are any changes you'd like to see, let me know. For example, I wasn't sure what the best type to return from digest/1 would be, so if you'd prefer a different type I can change it.
 

@Steve - Working implementation at http://github.com/sriramk/winazureerl/tree/master/src. Will blob about it tonight. Thanks a ton - couldn't have done it if you hadn't pushed me with that sha module. I was feeling lazy but with your code, I had no excuses :-)
 

Thank you very much for the great information.

Thanks