[Vrs-development] Re: [DotGNU]Execution of web services by the VRS

[Eric Altendorf]

On Saturday 12 October 2002 13:52, Charles Shuller wrote:
> I'm still a newbie, but what about a "plugin" type of approach. 
> Where you define specific interface functions to start and stop the
> web-service, ws_start, ws_stop, ws_unload (ws = web service)

I think this is along the lines of what we were trying to come up 
with.

> Forking a new process to actually load, unload, and otherwise
> manage the plugin might be a good idea, so you can easily kill it
> if something goes wrong, as opposed to loading the plugin directly
> into the VRS process.  

That's true -- there is an isolation advantage to having the plugins 
(webservices) in separate processes.  My guess, though, is that 
ultimately this will be too much of a performance hit... compare old 
style (pre apache mod-perl) CGI-bins where the scripts ran in 
separate interpreter processes ... to Java servlets.

> Is it difficult to determine if a .dll/.so
> is IL or not?  If not, determine the executable type on load(maby
> before forking the process to load it) and place it in the proper
> environment.  I know at one point I determined that it would be
> fairly straight forward to author portable (u*ix and win32, don't
> remember if I checked for VMS or not, and OS/390 has OE (which I
> understand is actually a Linux Distro now) code to do this, and I
> suspect this is still the case.

Yes, we should be able to tell what interpreter/exec-environment we 
need to run the code.  But we still need to pin down the mechanics of 
what interpreters/envornments are running in what processes, how many 
such things we need, how they load/unload the code, and how they 
communicate with each other.

Thanks for the input!  It's always good to keep alternatives in mind.

Eric

-- 
"First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.
 Then they fight you.  And then you win."             -Gandhi