[Webwork-user] Re: [Webwork-devel] WebWork and MessageQueuing

[John C. <car...@ll...>]

At 08:15 AM 5/22/2002 -0500, Dave Bryson wrote:
>On Tuesday 21 May 2002 06:33 pm, you wrote:
> > So I've been thinking, instead of programming, and I came up with the
> > following idea:  What if I use my WebWork ActionSupport beans in a message
> > queuing system?  The views.properties & a dispatcher would direct the
> > messages between various ActionSupport beans.  This is probably treading on
> > the area of JMS and message driven
> > beans, but I was wondering what the rest of you thought. It seems like it
> > could do things like
> > handle error conditions well, multicast with a comma separated list of
> > recipients, and select
> > between various output queues using views.properties.  How would
> > persistence be implemented?
>
>What are you trying to accomplish?  Do you want the Actions to serve as a
>bunch of workers that communicate via the message queue?

My current task is to input a list of drawing numbers, get the highest 
revision of the drawings
from an Oracle DBMS, fatten the lines on the drawing, convert the drawing 
to a multipage
PDF, and write the PDFs to a directory in preparation for burning to CD or 
DVD.  I've done
this task 3 times already, using JMS, Oracle AQ, and XML with 
directories.  In order to
make the system reconfigurable, I've had to do things like submit the 
pipeline that drawings
go through in advance, and then for each process, tell it which queue to 
pull from.  It would
be VERY nice if I could put all that decision making into a 
views.properties file or database
table, to make the system reconfigurable (say we wanted to skip the fatten 
step, or the
fatten step gets incorporated into the PDF conversion).

>Have you looked at Jini and JavaSpaces?

I think I looked at JavaSpaces--what persistence technology do they 
use?  We only have
a uniprocessor machine at this point, so I'm not sure how useful creating a 
lot of worker
bees on a queue would be.  Also, I haven't seen anything as reconfigurable 
as WebWork
OOTB, but maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

John