[plt-scheme] Soft State in the PLT Web Server

This is related to the notion of soft state put forth by the
recovery-oriented computing guys.

Shriram

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:19 PM, John Clements
<clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
>
> On May 18, 2009, at 1:37 PM, Jay McCarthy wrote:
>
>> From:
>> http://jay-mccarthy.blogspot.com/2009/05/soft-state-in-plt-web-server.html
>>
>> Many Web applications and network protocols have values in the
>> continuation that are necessary to complete the computation, but that
>> may be recomputed if they are not available. This is "soft state".
>
> BTW, this is related to an idea that I was thinking about a while ago w.r.t.
> debugging; state that cannot be recomputed, but which is not strictly
> necessary in order to complete the computation.  So, for instance, you might
> hold debugging information in such a way that it can be reclaimed if
> necessary, but at the cost of losing some debugging information.  This gives
> rise to a whole "spectrum of weakness"; that is: "Dear Mr. GC: you can
> reclaim this if you want, but I'd really rather you didn't."
>
> It sounds like this idea might also be applicable in a web framework, where
> you might want to prioritize weakness by the degree of difficulty of
> recomputing the given piece of information.
>
> John
>
>
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