| Re: [ecf-dev] Async-Methods |
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Hi Wim and Eugen, On 11/22/2010 1:28 PM, Wim Jongman wrote: Hi Eugen, Wim is quite right...this is a way to do progress monitoring on consumer side of a remote service. Admittedly it isn't ideal, however...as the client's progress indication doesn't actually get data from the host/service side in order to show progress....rather it just assumes some progress has been made because time passes. By way of explanation...the real problem here is that normal/OSGi remote method call doesn't support callbacks (and that's what IProgressMonitor or custom equivalent is). The reason for this is that it doesn't generally support remote method parameter pass-by-reference...which is needed to trivially support callbacks. With most providers remote method parameters are necessarily passed by value (i.e. method parameters are serialized and a copy is sent to the remote service host...rather than a distributed object reference). However, it's quite possible to define/create a messaging pattern to implement progress monitoring...e.g. with the ECF shared object API and/or the datashare API. This isn't strictly OSGi remote services, though. Both ECF APIs can/could be pretty easily used to define the messaging to support remote progress monitoring. One of the things that I've contemplated doing is to add such a feature to RegistrySharedObject (via the shared object api)...and perhaps even to the remote services API...for example exposing it via a new type of IFuture that would allow the specification of client-side progress monitors that actually use server-side messages to update. But, I haven't been able to personally work on this thread yet given the attention of OSGi remote services. If folks would like to persue adding such a feature then please open an enhancement request and consider contributing or supporting work in that area. Scott |