So, now it is time to explain the ongoing silence here.
First of all, I had many smaller projects which had a tight time schedule.
Secondly, I took a detour on the road to the perfect information visualization tool. As you might know from my previous blog entries, I was very enthusiastic implementing a workflow engine based on concepts from the Pi-Calculus and inspired by ROOM. The initial version was preemtive and multithreaded but not very convincing to me, the second version was directly implemented into the paramatrix client user interface and was cooperative, and now I decided to collect together all of the experience I made, to create a generic, cooperative one.
And this was my ongoing research for the last few weeks. Finally, today I finished the last feature from my internal requirement paper and now it supports an arbitrary set of timers and a C++ like exception handling. It is even prepared to work in a distributed environment (for this to finally work out, I need to enhance my data protocol specification language Metatype).
Perhaps this is the way to go, I am currently investigating methods to completely replace the client/server protocol used in the paramatrix 3D server by a generic model based on the workflow engine. This would simply replace any known concept of identities (I currently use simple IDs to identify remote objects).
Delays, delays, so when do I plan to finally finish the Paramatrix project? Don’t ask, creating reusable technology is my primary concern, and the engine I have created is already being used to implement real world projects.
Happy work – flow.