Re: [wsbpel] Q: process priority?

[Sid Askary <saskary@nuperus.com>]

Ron,
The later can be viewed as a subset of the former.  A Business priority may 
use Technical resources to achieve its goal.  The relationship between the 
two is what I see as implementation specific.

IMHO, The notion of a "priority" can be extended to the level of an 
activity (read workflow task) but it would make for quite an elaborate 
definition (not to mention implementation).  I'm inclined to think that 
priority" can be viewed as an attribute of the process.  This "process 
priority" attribute can then provide an abstraction for a combination of 
both intentions - and I see that in line with multiple intentions as far as 
BPEL is concerned.

What do you think?

---
Sid.

On Thu, 04 Sep 2003 13:13:41 -0700, Ron Ten-Hove <Ronald.Ten-Hove@Sun.COM> 
wrote:

> Sid,
>
> Your question brings to my mind another question (isn't that how 
> scientists stay in business? :-) ). What kind of priority to you mean? 
> There are two meanings that I can think of in our BPEL context:
>
> * Business priority. The equivalent of a rush order, meaning that
> preference should be given to the order ahead of "normal" priority
> orders.
> * Technical resource priority. Preferentially assigning computing
> resources to a particular process, or, alternatively, assigning
> only otherwise idle resources to a "nice" low-priority process.
>
> Of course there could be overlap; we me choose to give greater technical 
> priority to a high business-priority process, as a means of  fulfilling 
> the business goal.
>
> Both concepts have a place in the world, but I suspect the "technical" 
> priority is more of an implementation issue. Business priority often 
> shows up in workflow management systems, but BPEL's sparse model of work 
> items makes it difficult to discuss relative business priorities; there 
> is no real place where work items queue up, and can be prioritized. In 
> other words, I don't see how business priority can be reflected in a BPEL 
> model of a process at run-time. Perhaps that's just my lack of 
> imagination... :-)
>
> But I digress. What did you have in mind when you used the phrase 
> "process priority?"
>
> Cheers,
> -Ron
>
> Sid Askary wrote:
>
>> Since we are dealing with an execution language, the question of runtime 
>> priority comes to mind.  One could imagine an additional process 
>> property.  While there may be other methods, this could explicitly be 
>> expressed as an additional binary attribute to the process element 
>> followed, conditionally, by a new element.
>>
>> a)
>> <process  name="ncname" targetNamespace="uri"
>> queryLanguage="anyURI"?
>> .
>> .
>> prioritize="yes|no"?/>
>>
>> b)
>> <priority name="ncname"
>> priorityNumber="anynumber"
>> PriorityNumberBase="anynumber"/>
>>
>> NOTE:  PriorityNumberBase reflects the devisor for PriorityNumber.  
>> Alternatively, one could replace the two by a single floating-point 
>> fraction.
>>
>>
>> What does the group think?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sid.
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>



-- 
Sid.