On 26 Mar 2004, at 17:46, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
That's ALL _IMVHO_, I don't know what others think, but we mustn't forget that our container needs to solve one very very very specific problem, the Cocoon problem...
Hmm... Thought about it over some nicotine, and if people do really feel strong about not loosing component instances "all of a sudden", I'd rather go down the path the JVM uses: garbage collection.
When a block is "reloaded" (because of an update of its classes, or a change in its configuration), simply its instance remains available in the container, but "inactive".
All new lookups will happen on the new block instances, previously acquired components will still work with the old block, no question asked (never loose anything).
And then to have a some sort of "Garbage Collector" which flushes out all previously deployed block instances not having components instances wired from other blocks.
+1. I was about to propose exactly this, as we don't need to handle non-existing blocks as in the case of distributed systems. Blocks dependencies will always be satisfied, it just that "who" satifies it changes over time. So when a component is looked up, it's used until released, even if its originating block has been replaced by another one inbetween.
Something that has to be considered, though, is if the whole wire (i.e. all used components) between two blocks changes at once, or if traffic progressively switched from the old wire to the new one (i.e. lookup in the new block even if some components of the old one are still being used). The first solution avoids any consistency problems, but at the same time can prevent the actual wire switch to occur, especially under load, where there will be a permanent traffic over the old wire, preventing the switch to the new one.
Only thing I can think about is that some block might never be garbage collected because someone didn't release a wiring, but probably we can "force" a manual disconnection (notify the admin who triggered the reload, or something).
Yep.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
