title: Erlang, how to load applications with their dependencies
body: <p>I have some apps in my cluster, I need to start some of them sometimes on different hosts.</p>
  
  <p>The story is that the Erlang cluster is already running, so even though I have my .app resource file per application stating which applications should be started before mine, this only works to create a startup script, not to start an app in a already running node.</p>
  
  <p>At the moment I have a custom routine that uses application:get_key(Application,applications) to extract the dependencies and start them separately before starting the given application.</p>
  
  <p>I was wondering if there isn't a better way of doing this.</p>