Hi, Zubin and Bill --
Yup, it can get mucho ugly when we have multiple processes aging.
Shouldn't
these be topics by themselvesf?
1. Process Deployment
2. Process Versioning and Deprecation
Agree, or +1, I suppose, in Apache-speak.
For #2, the ante is "new instances are generated by the most recently
deployed description", and there's the boolean question of whether
old instances should be allowed to live or should be forcibly
terminated. (Note that forcible termination could be a big deal if
you have thousands or millions of active instances.)
It was my intention to put together an instance replacement feature
for PXE, but it's also one of those intentions that I never really
made good on... The idea would be that you could do something like
create a process instance in a standalone container of some kind or
extract an instance from the runtime state store, feed it some
messages, tinker with values, maybe change some XPath statements,
etc., and then shove it back in. As-is, PXE supports in-place
replacement of processes as long as the ports for the new process are
a subset of the ports for the old process, but there's no API to make
it work.
The "rip-and-replace" functionality would open up all kinds of cool
things like "rewind" -- keep all of a processes various states
around, and if you want to rewind back a couple of execution steps,
just replace the current one with the older one.
--
Paul R Brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mult.ifario.us/
