[ome-devel] Shoola-back-end consistency issues

[Harry Hochheiser]

Jason:

On Jul 7, 2005, at 2:54 AM, Jason Swedlow wrote:
> OK, let's tone it down a bit.  No more flames from anyone.
>
No flaming, I promise.

> Harry and Josh's original question has been addressed and has a few 
> possible answers.  We will need to explore these, and get some data.  
> Right now, everyone is working flat out on a variety of things, and we 
> do have a backlog of items that are critical for user reqs.  The 
> refresh button is not ideal, causes us all sorts of problems, but is 
> enough for the moment.  Let's see where our resources are at the end 
> of the summer and then consider the implementation of this.
>
> ....

fair enough, but I want to be very clear on this: implementing refresh 
buttons in the various agents is neither simple nor fun. Given n agents 
with different DTOs and data requirements, and a stateless server, it 
will be somewhere between tricky and virtually impossible to handle 
refreshes in a generalized manner.  Given the data requirements for 
some of the Shoola clients, doing a "dumb" stateless refresh will be 
incredibly slow and wasteful. If I've downloaded a 5MB dataset, and one 
image gets added, I simply can't say "re-request the whole dataset".  
The client performance would go to hell, and we'd spend lots of 
bandwidth needlessly shuffling things back and forth.  I might be able 
to solve this special-case for certain cases, but generalizing it would 
be difficult, if it's even possible.

So, the upshot is that I'm not even going to attempt to address these 
questions just yet. I'm just going to punt on consistency.

A parting thought: Andrea, Jean-Marie, and Doug  have done a first-rate 
job at building the infrastructure that makes Shoola work. However, 
it's still much harder than it needs to be to build rich Java clients 
that provide interesting new functionality to users. As long as 
developers of client systems have to build custom mechanisms for making 
requests from the database and insuring data consistency, client 
development will be more painful and less productive than it might be.

-harry