> I occasionally speculate about possible changes to Quixote that would
> make it possible to return a response a bit at a time.  This would be
> especially nice when the back-end computation takes some time, and
> yields incremental results.  It would have to be optional, because it
> would screw up Quixote's nice exception handling.  Neil usually tells me
> to stop worrying, hardware is getting faster and cheaper all the time,
> etc.

Another case where it would be nice is not related to computation times and
hardware speed, but to user feedback when a server process is inherently
long lived.

When I have a process, server side, that takes a certain time to complete,
and all the while returns gradual feedback about its completion status, it
is important to timely show that feedback to the user.

I realize that the http protocol is not designed for such situations, but
there's no option to switch to somebody else, since the application is
specified to be web based.

An alternative could be to return what we have and specify an auto-refresh
time for each page until the server process job is complete, but it is ugly.


--
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and
dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders
and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that
would be enough immortality for me."  E. J. Dijkstra, August 1995

Nicola Larosa - nico@tekNico.net