Yes, but the question is:
Can the Producer throw a “related fault”
before sending the proactive notification to the Consumer?
If the answer is no, the Producer will
have to maintain the previous version of a Portlet until the next call.
If the answer is yes, the Consumer must be
ready to get a fault before (or instead of?) the notification.
Regards,
Artem
From: Rich Thompson
[mailto:richt2@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005
9:49 PM
To: wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [wsrp] Spec defined
events
I think the spec would need to have a paragraph
describing the difference between these proactive notifications and related
faults. It may also be worth having the notifications carry a flag indicating
whether or not the next use of the relevant resource is likely to result in a
fault if the notification is ignored.
Rich
"Spector, Artem"
<artem.spector@sap.com>
03/10/05 01:48 PM
|
To
|
<wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org>
|
cc
|
|
Subject
|
RE: [wsrp] Spec defined events
|
|
Is it assumed that all these events express
backward-compatible changes on the Producer side? I mean if the Consumer
ignores these “proactive notifications” and keeps invoking the
Portlets in the same way, they keep working?
If an event expresses a non-backward-compatible change on
some Portlet and the Consumer ignores this event, then on the next invocation
of this Portlet an exception will be thrown. This exception could be for
example OperationFailed, and it will not be easy to the Consumer to understand
the reason of the fault and to recover.
Do you think that the backward-compatibility semantics should
be defined for each spec defined event, and the Consumer should be responsible
to treat the “severe” events before the next invocations?
Since the Producer may notify the Consumer only on pbia or
handleEvent invocation, there always can be a situation when:
1. Portlet P1 is changed and the producer is waiting for the
next invocation to inform the Consumer
2. The Consumer invokes P1 and gets an exception
So if the backward-compatibility is really relevant here, we
have to admit that sometimes exceptions should be used for passing information
to the Consumer.
Regards,
Artem
From: Rich Thompson [mailto:richt2@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 7:53 PM
To: wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [wsrp] Spec defined events
Interesting questions. Other than the last one, they all seem predicated on an
implementation style that tracks changes and does a computation upon
interaction to determine whether or not to generate one of these events.
Another implementation choice (that happens to avoid the bulk of these issues)
is to persistently store the need to provide one of these notifications to each
known Consumer and then delete the record saying the need exists when it is
delivered. In addition to removing datetime computation while processing a
request, this also permits notification by means other than event delivery. An
example of this would be to consider a getServiceDescription invocation as
removing any Producer/Portlet metadata change notifications as the response
will already update the Consumer.
The other point about these event definitions is that their purpose would not
be to require any particular functionality, but rather to provide a
standardized means by which a Producer could proactively inform a Consumer
about changes. Whether or not a particular Producer or Consumer implementation
makes use of this means to reduce polling for metadata would still be entirely
implementation dependent.
On the last question, I do not think it is up to the spec to define what a
change is that should trigger any of these notifications. Rather they are
defined as a means for carrying a notification that a particular form of
metadata has changed. As a result of this, I would resist optimizations such as
having the ProducerMetadataChanged event payload carry the new
ServiceDescription. Instead, the event is just a notification and it is up to
the Consumer to decide when and how to respond to the information.
Rich
Subbu Allamaraju
<subbu@bea.com>
03/10/05 10:57 AM
|
To
|
wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
|
cc
|
|
Subject
|
Re: [wsrp] Spec defined events
|
|
> As to other options to carry such notifications by other means, why
> would we add such dependencies when we already have a channel that could
> easily carry the information. I agree that the Consumer is not likely to
> display the fact that it received such an event to normal end-users, but
> it certainly would be valuable info to display to system admins (or
> queue for display to them).
Thanks Rich. You make some good arguments. So, let me counter with few
more questions.
o Producers don't necessarily know whether the Consumer's version of the
Producer's metadata is current or not, unless it starts to keep track of
all metadata requests.
o The Producer has to keep track of metadata changes persistently and
make sure to cleanup those changes periodically.
o The only time a Producer could return events is via handldEvent(s) and
pbia responses (excluding fault conditions). This may be acceptable.
o Assuming that the Producer recognized a change, how would it know
whether a given Consumer should be notified or not? Should it start
sending notifications to all Consumers (including those that already
have the current metadata)? Such Consumers will have to do some extra
processing before ignoring the event.
o Should the Producer keep sending events for ever or just once? It
can't be the latter since the Producer does not always know about
Consumers. So, it does not know which Consumer was already notified.
I think, a more fundamental question how would the spec define what a
"change" is.
Regards,
Subbu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: wsrp-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org
For additional commands, e-mail: wsrp-help@lists.oasis-open.org