Conference ilbbak::ibi_focus

274.0. "Foc remote,always up,mailboxes" by THRILL::WILS (Joris Wils) Wed Oct 18 1989 15:47

    I'd like to have FOCUS running remote on a small machine like a uVAX
    and have my users access it through ALL-IN-1 from a remote machine
    using mostly pre-written FEX's.
    
    The jobs that need to be run are fairly short and I don't want the
    uVAX to go through the overhead of starting up FOCUS, running the FEX
    and then shutting down FOCUS. I'd rather have one FOCUS process in a
    loop of some kind.
    
    I envision doing the following:
    
    - Put FOCUS in dialogue manager loop
    - At the top of the loop read the name of the next FEX to be run out
      of a VMS mailbox.
         in FOCUS: -SET &NEXT_FEX = READ_MAILBOX(&NEXT_FEX);
    - Run the FEX
         in FOCUS: -EX &NEXT_FEX
    - Go back to the top of the loop.
    
    A separate process on the uVAX will receive messages from the ALL-IN-1
    system using the VAX Site Scheduler or the PAMS messaging facility. It
    will pass these messages on to the mailbox that the FOCUS process reads
    out of.
    
    Any one have any comments on this?
    
                                              Thanks, Joris

    If you look in FOOT::MRE_INTEREST , you may find that MRE will allow
    a dissimilar sort of interaction, but will allow a user to build
    and validate a .FEX , before executing it in batch on a remote machine.
    
    The results are then sent back to the user's All-in-1 account.
    
    David

    It might be more efficient to write a user written subroutine that
    
    	- sets a write attention AST to a mailbox
    	- hibernates until AST fires
    	- reads mailbox
    	- returns fexname to focexec
    
    CJ