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Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 12:08:09 -0800
From: Laurence Melloul <melloul@stanford.edu>
Organization: Stanford University
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Hi all,

Here is a summary of today's meeting.

We discussed EXAMINE, and Partial/Progressive extract.

- EXAMINE:

We keep the previous syntax:
(mystatus = status, myprogress = progress) = invocation_handle.EXAMINE()

status: chaims integer of value {ERROR, DONE, NOT_DONE}
progress: chaims integer whose semantics is megamodule specific.
Could give qualitative/quantitative information.

Suggestion for partial results information (in the case where some
results
might be ready before others - Gio, we assumed such situation could make
sense in very long and intensive computation; we could not come up with
a
good example though):

	bit vector signalling which results are ready accordingly to what is
	specified in the repository

Problem: what if progress wants to give both qualitative AND
quantitative info?
	 Maybe we should need two separate fields, one for quantitative
	 progress, and one for qualitative progress
	 We mainly discussed the quantitative aspect.


- EXTRACT

Partial/progressive extraction:
It is the responsability of the server to update the progress field and
make
progressive/partial results accessible.

Here is a suggestion for an interface in the server, called from the
wrapper
(one again, we mainly had in mind partial extraction):

class server {
public:
	data method1();
	int method1_progress() { return method1_progress; }
	data_list method1_extract() { return list composed of data members
				      (ptr1, ptr2, ptr3) which are not null
				    }

private:
	data *ptr1, *ptr2, *ptr3;
	int method1_progress; // bit vector
}

The wrapper calls method1_progress when EXAMINE is called by the client
and status is NOT_DONE.

The wrapper calls method1_extract when EXTRACT is called by the client
and ( status is NOT_DONE && method1_progress() != 0) // 0 or whatever
the
semantics which signifies no progress is.


Laurence.