Re: Can I make my servlet wait/delay for... maybe 500 - 1000 ms

2009-12-17 Thread Peter Crowther
2009/12/17 Ingo Gambin igam...@brilliant.de

 Basically with already existing pdf-files that works fine, but checking
 the whole procedures inserting timing-outputs I realized that, although
 the extraction method is done and the next methods are called, itext (or
 the system) is still writing the file to directory B and therefore when
 the browser tries to embed it (adobe plugin) its not fully written and
 the adobe plugin can not read it because of that.


I'm surprised, as I didn't think itext used background threads in order to
write a document.  Certainly I've never had a problem with this, though I
may just have been lucky!  Is the directory on the same machine, or is it
remote?  If remote, network bandwidth/latency may be causing the issue you
describe.


 now I wonder how to solve that problem. So to my ideas:
a) only continue after extraction when the file is fully written
= Actually I have no idea about how to check that


I'd ask Bruno and co on the itext list how you would know that itext has
finished.


b) have the servlet wait/sleep for maybe up to a second
= from what I found so far, sleeping a servlet is NOT
good and on the other hand what if one pdf-page i want
to extract is so big/has so many graphics in it that the
process lasts longer than a second

 Not good is a generalisation; let's look at the specifics.  First off,
you're not sleeping a servlet; you're sleeping a thread.  Sleeping a
thread means that the request being handled by that thread takes longer to
complete.  Therefore, the thread is returned to the pool later.  Therefore,
more threads are needed to achieve the same throughput.  This is only a
problem if your server can't handle the extra load.

I wouldn't just throw sleep calls around the code like they were confetti,
but I'll confess to having one place in my own code where a HTTP request has
to wait for an external executable to complete its task and write some rows
into a relational database.  Unfortunately the only approach here is to
poll: repeatedly try to retrieve the I'm done row, sleeping a while
between each test.  It works well enough, until we get a better
architectural solution to the problem.

- Peter


Re: Can I make my servlet wait/delay for... maybe 500 - 1000 ms

2009-12-17 Thread André Warnier

Peter Crowther wrote:

2009/12/17 Ingo Gambin igam...@brilliant.de


Basically with already existing pdf-files that works fine, but checking
the whole procedures inserting timing-outputs I realized that, although
the extraction method is done and the next methods are called, itext (or
the system) is still writing the file to directory B and therefore when
the browser tries to embed it (adobe plugin) its not fully written and
the adobe plugin can not read it because of that.



I'm surprised, as I didn't think itext used background threads in order to
write a document.  Certainly I've never had a problem with this, though I
may just have been lucky!  Is the directory on the same machine, or is it
remote?  If remote, network bandwidth/latency may be causing the issue you
describe.



now I wonder how to solve that problem. So to my ideas:
   a) only continue after extraction when the file is fully written
   = Actually I have no idea about how to check that



I'd ask Bruno and co on the itext list how you would know that itext has
finished.



   b) have the servlet wait/sleep for maybe up to a second
   = from what I found so far, sleeping a servlet is NOT
   good and on the other hand what if one pdf-page i want
   to extract is so big/has so many graphics in it that the
   process lasts longer than a second

Not good is a generalisation; let's look at the specifics.  First off,

you're not sleeping a servlet; you're sleeping a thread.  Sleeping a
thread means that the request being handled by that thread takes longer to
complete.  Therefore, the thread is returned to the pool later.  Therefore,
more threads are needed to achieve the same throughput.  This is only a
problem if your server can't handle the extra load.

I wouldn't just throw sleep calls around the code like they were confetti,
but I'll confess to having one place in my own code where a HTTP request has
to wait for an external executable to complete its task and write some rows
into a relational database.  Unfortunately the only approach here is to
poll: repeatedly try to retrieve the I'm done row, sleeping a while
between each test.  It works well enough, until we get a better
architectural solution to the problem.


1) I have no idea how one can call an external OS-level command from Java
2) this being said, if it happened to be possible to call this command 
and swallow it's output, then I would do it as follows :

- open an input stream on the output of the external command
- have the external command run and produce its output to STDOUT (which 
my stream swallows)
- read the input stream until I get an EOF (at which point the external 
command is presumably done writing)

- output what I read, as the response of my servlet, back to the client
- when I'm done, cleanup whatever needs to be

In perl, I would do this approximately as :
open(PDFPAGE,'here comes the command | ');
while { read PDFPAGE until EOF
  print CLIENT what I read;
}
close PDFPAGE;


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RE: Can I make my servlet wait/delay for... maybe 500 - 1000 ms

2009-12-17 Thread Caldarale, Charles R
 From: André Warnier [mailto:a...@ice-sa.com]
 Subject: Re: Can I make my servlet wait/delay for... maybe 500 - 1000
 ms
 
 1) I have no idea how one can call an external OS-level command from Java

Runtime.exec() is the traditional way; the ProcessBuilder class available in 
1.5+ provides more control over the child process.

 - Chuck


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