Subject: Re: I MOVE we simplify the query language.

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 17:57:22 -0500

>> You ignored my question of why a small device would run a CS.
>
>Because I can sell it.

This pushes the question back: why would someone buy a CS running on a 
handheld?

>Because it was a CAP requirement to support thin devices.

Where is the CAP requirements doc? It's not available as a Draft or an 
RFC.  However, I suspect that the requirement was to support thin clients, 
not thin servers.  (We've definitely talked about thin clients before, but 
I don't remember talking about thin servers.  And, in any case, the two 
are mutually exclusive; *somebody's* got to do the work.)

>>>>Pushing the query back towards the 
>>>>store makes for less bandwidth and less CAP processing.
>>>>
>>>I would suspect that a CUA won't ask for what it can't handle.
>> 
>> That's not feasible.  The CUA, almost by definition, has no idea how 
much 
>> stuff is going to come down.
>
>It is a TCP connection. Read what you can process when you
>can process it. We don't have to invent flow control.

We're not talking about keeping up with the connection; we're talking 
about paying for the bandwidth.

>Or the CUA will have set the MAX size when it connected in
>its capabilities and the CS will have never sent large replies.

Without USING*, it is likely that the only way a CUA can get what it needs 
is to accept large replies.

>> Anyway, without the USING constructs, it is impossible for the CUA to 
make 
>> some of the most important queries (e.g., "today's alarms"), which 
>> guarantees that the CUA will frequently have to pull down too much 
stuff.
>
>OR - my PDA can call a stored query that my mega-windows-GUI created
>that gets what the PDA wants.

So what? You still need a query language with USING, whether the query was 
composed on a thin client or a thick one.  And for basic functionality 
like "today's alarms", the PDA can include a hard-wired query; you don't 
need a GUI to compose it.

Besides, as things stand, a stored query would be useless for "today's 
alarms", or "today's events", because the query language has no term for 
"today".

/==========================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer       |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.  |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.  |
|==========================================================|
|"Collect call from reality, will you accept the--" *click*|
\==========================================================/

---

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 18:03:47 -0500

>Bare bones query including allowing for a LITE-CUA to call stored queries
>that perhaps were setup by a FULL-QL CUA, even when the LITE-CUA
>can not generate those queries.

But having a thin CUA use queries composed by a fat CUA does not solve 
anybody's problem.  If the thin CUA doesn't understand the full language, 
then it doesn't know what query to run for each piece of its GUI.

>I know that John disagrees with
>stored queries, but I don't see why a LITE-CUA could not be built
>that ONLY supported pre-defined queries.

They should be pre-defined at compile time, not at run time.  The thin CUA 
doesn't *need* a fat CUA to compose the queries, because it only needs a 
handful of queries, composed by the developer, not by the user.

>Perhaps the best break point would be that a MIN version could
>not support any USING operators. 

Without USING, you're really stuck.  As we've already demonstrated, 
without USING, you can't even query for alarms in a given time range--and 
alarms are the most important reason to carry a PDA with a CUA.

/============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer         |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.    |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.    |
|============================================================|
|"God does not play games with His loyal servants." "Whoo-ee,|
|where have you *been*?" --_Good Omens_                      |
\============================================================/