RE: Issue: Synchronous vs. Asynch.

Larry,

You are quite right.  Let's look at it a different way.  If you find that
you need SWAP to communicate to external systems and you need the timeliness
of response that Synchronous implies, you must handle the situation where
the remote system does not respond.  Then you either abort or fall back.
Right?

Since the remote system probably belongs to someone else and you are merely
a requestor you must allow for unavailability.

So you are quite right, too, that there is little difference in this
situation between Synchronous and Asynchronous.  So if there is little
difference, I repeat "in what case is Synchronous needed?

Michael Oliver
Senior Technical Research Engineer
Product Marketing
Open Text Corporation
7391 S. BullRider Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85747
(520)574-8272 Voice
(520)574-8273 Fax
ollie@opentext.com
http://www.opentext.com

-----Original Message-----
From:	Larry Masinter [mailto:masinter@parc.xerox.com]
Sent:	Thursday, October 15, 1998 12:35 AM
To:	ollie@opentext.com; Bussler, Christoph; gbolcer@ics.uci.edu;
ietf-swap@w3.org
Subject:	RE: Issue: Synchronous vs. Asynch.

Michael Oliver wrote:

> Anything is possible, but I would ask in what case is Synchronous needed?
A
> workflow between systems usually some business process, like an approval,
an
> application of data to some business process that returns results when it
> completes.
>
> To me Synchronous usually relates to real time control, a continuous data
> stream or a tightly coupled command and result, not a business workflow
> process that is a request and a response.
>
> If you can make a case for the need for Synchronous communications between
> workflow engines then please do.

We're looking at hybrid systems where there are both
manual and automated processes. The product gets ordered,
the credit card gets verified, the factory workers assemble
the product, the documentation gets printed automatically, the
package gets assembled and shipped, the credit card gets charged.

Some of the steps happen with a potentially long delay, while others
happen quickly enough to complete as a request/response.
If we can use SWAP to allow tighter integration of business processes,
it will help organizational efficiency. I'm not sure there's a clear
dividing line between 'synchronous' and 'asynchronous'; we're just
trying to decide whether the action usually happens more quickly than
the mean time between network partitioning.

Larry
--
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Thursday, 15 October 1998 09:57:08 UTC