Paul, You are on the button about the "forcible termination" approach giving users fits in long running processes. In my humble opinion, versioning is a key area where innovation can lead to Ode being truly distinctive. It's a tough problem.
If there is a SWAT team electing to get into it, I'm in. Cheers, Zubin. On 5/4/06, Paul R Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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/
