[Pipet Devel] Getting rid of modification of xml definition files

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by `class` here, I guess you're talking
> about node definitions and node instanaces, right?

That's right.  I'm just using the OO analogy.

> Yup, since you can load a workflow diagram from a *.n file, it has
> enough info to reflect the state of the networks at any time. So to do
> crash recovery, the dl would just make periodic saves of *.n files
> while running, and then make this available should a crash occur. I
> already have a separate thread devoted to filesystem access, so I can
> just set this up to do saves every once in a while.

The .n file works well with the another analogy I've been making, that the
network can be treated as some sort of "document" (Jean-Marc's actual name for
it), where the user can do "new", "open", "close", "save" and "save as"
(perhaps even "undo") with the network.  Periodic saving of .n is then akin to
any prgram creating a temp file (Emacs, for example, keeps a temp file named
<filename>~).  Then, should .n be considered a temp file until the user
explicitly calls "save"?

I, for one, have no objections to Brad's and Jean-Marc's plan here.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                                           jeff at bioinformatics.org
Director, Bioinformatics.org: The Open Lab     http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
"Let the machine do the dirty work." -- Kernighan and Ritchie
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