RE: [wsbpel-implement] Fault tolerance considerations

["Eckenfels. Bernd" <B.Eckenfels@seeburger.de>]

Title: Message

Hello Mike,

 

nothing stops you from doing it async, and in fact for reliability reasons it is a good idea to use async methods, possibly with reliable messaging. But if you have to implement a sync. web service with Best-Efford Quality of Service, you should be able to do this.

 

Our engine allows the QOS to be configured. Currently in both cases the problem is detected on the reply activity (not before), and then is decided if the (unhandled) error should be preserved or forgotten, because there is nothing which can be done about it.

 

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Bernd Eckenfels
Chief Architect
--
SEEBURGER AG - Edisonstr.1 , D-75015 Bretten, Germany
Fax: +49 (0)7252 96-2400 - Phone: +49 (0)7252 96-1256
mailto:b.eckenfels@seeburger.de - http://www.seeburger.de

-----Original Message-----
From: Marin, Mike [mailto:MMarin@filenet.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 6:30 PM
To: Ron Ten-Hove; Fletcher, Tony
Cc: Ugo Corda; bpel implementation
Subject: RE: [wsbpel-implement] Fault tolerance considerations

 

Edwin’s suggestion does make sense; but note that this is not only an “error recovery” issue. This arises during normal operation. Let assume that your engine handle thousands of processes per hour, and so at any given moment, some of those processes will be in between the receive/reply pair. How do you bring the engine down for maintenance (let say hardware upgrade or database backup)?

 

The act of bringing the engine down will certainly stop some of the processes in the middle of the receive/reply pair. Most engines will consider shutting down the engine as a normal operation, and they will keep the state of all the running processes, but in this case you are forced into considering it as an abnormal operation for those processes that are in the receive/reply pair.

 

Again, IMHO receive/reply should be asynchronous. They can be seen as synchronous from a invoke perspective, but unless is implemented as asynchronous it creates unnecessary issues for the implementer.

 

--

Regards,

Mike Marin

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Ten-Hove [mailto:Ronald.Ten-Hove@Sun.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 8:28 AM
To: Fletcher, Tony
Cc: Ugo Corda; Marin, Mike; bpel implementation
Subject: Re: [wsbpel-implement] Fault tolerance considerations

 

Tony,

Fletcher, Tony wrote:

Dear Ron, Mike, Ugo, and others,

 

Is this problem not occurring because of layer violation.  Surely BPEL - and BPEL implementations - should not need to worry beyond setting a timeout at the sending side on an invoke to which a reply is expected.  At the BPEL should just a hand a message over to the SOAP HTTP implementation, and receive messages back from it.  Exactly how the message is sent (and in particular whether the response rides on an HTTP response or request is surely not a BPEL concern  (???)

I think the issue arises only in error cases, where error recovery/handling may need some extra insight into the lower-level binding characteristics. As Edwin has suggested, this can be determined at deployment time, along with suitable recovery policies. Obviously this sort of thing is implementation-specific, but Edwin's approach makes a lot of sense.

-Ron