[Pipet Devel] toolkit and data access/storage

[Konrad Hinsen]

> > I personally don't like CGI
> > because of it's unflexible fork-request-once-response-once-terminate
> > assumption. I suspect these tools are running for a longer time period and
> > we would like to be able to find out about their state.
>                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Yes!  This is something I realized would not work with standard CGI.  These
> analysis algorithms (server side only) will be longer lived than standard CGI
> scripts.  Some may take hours or days to complete.  I would like to return

There are solutions to this. Something I have considered for
monitoring long-running MD simulations is a two-threaded program
(remember that Python has very nice threading support) with one thread
running the simulation and the other one running the Zope HTTP server
(which is a specialized Web server for ZPublisher). Since threads
share global data, the Web server could always access the state of the
simulation and provide any information the user wants.

Also have a look at the PCGI (persistent CGI)
http://starship.skyport.net/crew/jbauer/persistcgi/ system, which is
more generic.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
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