-> while this is not specifically a quixote question, this involves a
-> quixote app and i'm gonna take advantage of the knowledge base here .

;)

-> we have an application where users enter information that will feed into
-> a long running process.  what they would like is to enter the
-> information, submit it and receive a response with the url that they
-> should go to in an hour to get their results.
->
-> what is the best way to handle this type of situation?  should the
-> quixote class handling the request take the information, setup the long
-> process and fork a child to run the long running process, while the
-> parent returns the reponse?  or should we pass the information to some
-> "thing" (be it database/config file/whatever) and have a separate
-> process that polls for entries to that thing that then handles running
-> the long running process?

Hi, Tom,

the forking approach should work, esp. if you're using the SCGI server
to run Quixote (as opposed to, say, mod_python).  You might have to work
out how to close down the Quixote parts of the forked child process
but that should be simple.

One problem is that you still need to store the results for retrieval.
For robustness, I'd suggest storing them somewhere external to the
process (like a database) so that you can stop the process without
losing already completed jobs.  At that point you might as well go
with the second option anyway, IMO ;).

cheers,
--titus