Assuming it's straightforward to extend OTP-style process monitoring to external processes (and I'm assuming that the couchjs processes are so monitored today) then I like the proposal to add both of these things.
My obvious motivation is couchdb-lucene so, with that hat on, would this mechanism obviate the need for start couchdb-lucene externally and make the Python hook script obsolete? I think it does. Finally, there are cases where c-l users might wish to locate their c-l server on a different box, so we should allow the proxying independently of the launch-on-demand-and-keep-me-running bit. B. On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Paul Davis <paul.joseph.da...@gmail.com> wrote: > At CouchCamp there was a bit of discussion on replacing the _external > API with something a bit more modern to give _external processes more > control over their environment. > > The idea was born out of a discussion with Robert Newson who mentioned > that couchdb-lucene really only needs a reverse proxy to put itself in > the same URL namespace. It occurred to us that having a reverse proxy > instead of the current _external stdio protocol would allow lots of > other interesting features like node.js integration, as well as allow > implementors to handle requests in parallel and so on and such forth. > > The major drawback that was identified was that if we switched to just > a reverse proxy, people would then be responsible for handling the > process management of their _external handlers. Ie, they'd have to > configure daemon monitoring to make sure the processes stayed up and > what not. The solution we came up with was to include another feature > that did process management. Ie, something that would bring up an OS > process when the server booted, and respawn it if it crashed. There'd > be no connection to the _externals. Other than the basic "just keep a > process up" sort of behaviour, the only other thing I could see adding > is a simple stdio protocol to get configuration values from CouchDB. > Other people have expressed interest in just the process management > functionality as well which makes me think that having the two new > features to replace the _external API would be both easier on > developers as well as providing more functionality. > > So now I'm looking for feedback on what other people might think of > this. I'll start working on this fairly soon if I don't hear any major > objections. > > HTH, > Paul Davis >
