I agree with Noah that a major difference (I think Noah would say /the/ major difference) between the flavors of request-response and true fire and forget is to do with timing. You can generally do either over the other (actually you can't: see /below/), but you may get nasty surprises when, say, the callback that's waiting for a response to your FAF request hangs around longer than you want. Unfortunately, trying to define things like "longer than you want" or "long-running operation" is tricky. To some people microseconds may be a long time. Others may not mind waiting for minutes or hours. The way out, I believe, is just to talk about what steps you have to go through in each situation. In request-response, receiving a response -- and thus waiting for it -- is part of the contract (modulo failure). In FAF, it isn't. Or more accurately, in cases where you still do have to wait for something, it's pushed into a different operation. It's not part of the contract for the FAF MEP. I'm afraid this is either tautological or completely obscure (or both). /Below/: Multicast pub/sub protocols are inherently FAF. If I try to layer request-response on top of such a protocol using WSA, I will get any number of responses (including zero) depending on who's listening to the multicast.Received on Wednesday, 8 February 2006 22:30:32 GMT
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