From: Clark Snowdall Date: 2007-05-25T04:10:55+09:00 Subject: SOAP4r, threads, and Windows ... the mystery Hello, I am part of a team developing a remote computing tool of sorts. My part is to write the part that accesses a remote machine and dispatches essentially a batch job on that machine and fetches the output from the process. I have decided to use SOAP as the communication protocol. Everything was well and good until we started tackling batch jobs on remote machines that would last longer than the SOAP timeout. I came up with a prototype that uses two SOAP servers to communicate between the initiating machine and the remote machine running the batch file. I then put the batch call into a thread and when it completes it notifies the initiating machine through its SOAP server. Here's where things get interesting. If both machines are Unix (I've tested on FC6 and Mac OS X), everything works fine. But, if the remote machine executing the batch file is Windows, then the SOAP call to initiate the run of the batch thread blocks until that thread completes, even though you can see execution PAST the thread start. And if the batch file thread takes longer, then hte SOAP connection times out on the client end. It sems that there is some issues in how SOAP and thread execution are handled on Windows. In the short term I was going to punt on this: capture the timeout error and move on (as usual we have a product demo coming up). But I'd eventually like a more elegant solution. I'm hoping someone else on this list might have seen something like this before. You can find the source of my prototype at: http://homepage.mac.com/snowdall/.Public/upload.tar To run it: 1. untar the package 2. in one terminal window cd into the directory and type "ruby inner_wrapper_server.rb" to start the process that would be on the remote machine 3. in another terminal window, cd into the directory and type "ruby runner.rb" to start the process from the initiating machine. The file core.rb represents what would be the remote batch file. The set_input and get_output methods would be used to send input to the batch file and get the output repsectively. Try running it on Unix and it works ... trying Windows and it fails. Good luck and thanks, Snowdall -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.