Messing with erlang and gen_event behaviour

Answer 1

If you register the handler, it will have a globally known name , and then you can send messages to it directly.

Answer 2

I am not sure I understand the question but assuming you are after a sort of message switch to enable Clients to exchange messages in a distributed fashion, you could look at one my projects that does just that: Mswitch.

Of course if you register a "global process" (accessible locally and/or remotely), you can always shuttle messages to it and have this process distribute the said messages as you see fit. Be sure not to forget about the common pitfalls of making processes in different Emulator instances talk to each other (cookie sync and registered VM name).