Make it possible to start additional OTP-Applications

[hirschenberger]

It should be possible to specify additional (external) OTP-Applications to be started in the boss.conf file. It is usefull to implement some complex backend functionality (e.g. gen_fsm ...)

A possible solution would be to add an {included_applications, [myapp]} tag to boss.conf which will be added to the boss application's environment.
When the boss-app is starting it evaluates this list and starts the apps in boss' supervisor.

I can try to implement it if you think it is a clean way and the feature is wanted.

[jeremyong]

+1 to this feature.

This actually seems to work when I try it by modifying the boss.config and rebar.config file and adding the path to my application. However, running external OTP applications in this way seems to produce unwanted side-effects, like the Boss framework attempting to load routes for the external app.

Another possibility I see beyond your suggestion is to modify the rebar plugin in priv/rebar to handle starting these additional applications.

Thoughts?

[danikp]

as described in #530, there is Erlang way to do that