Apps Messaging - Semantics of a Message

[Mike Fitzpatrick]

Hi John,

In the python case you mention there is nothing that prevents an
interface from being developed that works synchronously for that
interface.  What I want to avoid is writing synch behavior into the
spec and running into the problem of blocked processes where
we have an app that crashes or just runs for a long time.  One
thing I haven't discussed is a 'timeout' or 'time-to-live' property
of messages.  For the moment we're considering interactive
response times, however an analysis app, or one that spends
time downloading data from the network might not reply for
several minutes or more.  Asynch behavior allows us to work
around that and handle a response much later in time, we could
also specify the idea of 'alarms' that let us punt if no response
is received after a fixed time.

Of course, there are those amongst us who would claim that we
should build a VOevent handler into the system to deal with this 8-)

Cheers,
-Mike
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