On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Martin Davis <mda...@opengeo.org> wrote: > I like Juan's goal of reducing the number of logical combinations that have > to be considered. It seems like the WPS spec has it backwards. What you > really want to know is whether a process can be called as synch - *any* > process could be called as asynch, with the only repercussion some slight > inefficiency for fast processes.
Indeed. Unfortunately the writers created a spec for a network protocol without considering the first of the distributed computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing): the network is _not_ reliable, practically speaking not to the point that you can assume a http connection will stay up for hours waiting for a long process to complete. > So maybe provide both synch and asynch annotation attributes, but default > them both to true, so that the only thing that really needs to be supplied > is synch=false for long-running processes? I'm not sure when you would ever > want to say asynch=false... Yep, I agree. asynch=false would make sense for a WPS server that gives the process writer the onus to handle an asynch process, but GeoServer makes that transparent. One borderline case would be a process that has no support for progress notification, yet can take long and is not streaming. I'd argue such process is likely broken, but implementors might argue back that adding progress support is too much of a overhead. > As for providing this metadata in a Map, is a more structured alternative to > provide a specific class carrying the various metadata values? I guess Maps > are used elsewhere in GT/GS for this kind of thing, but in this case where > the parameters are all known in advance it seems like a type-checked class > would give more support. That's the key, knowing in advance. In the rest of GeoTools we did not assume we could know in advance, and indeed new needs have been popping up over time. One could say that a class can get new fields, and I would agree, but it you have a need that the community does not share you're forced into a fork, a map is more lenient in that direction. I'd prefer an open ended map with well known keys for the reasons above Cheers Andrea -- Ing. Andrea Aime GeoSolutions S.A.S. Tech lead Via Poggio alle Viti 1187 55054 Massarosa (LU) Italy phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 962313 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/ http://www.youtube.com/user/GeoSolutionsIT http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaaime http://twitter.com/geowolf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ GeoTools-Devel mailing list GeoTools-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
