Best way to get status when Iron.io task is completed using Laravel 4 queues - queue

I am going to use Laravel 4 queues and integrate them with Iron.io
All of that is pretty straight forward, and I dont think I am going to have problems with that.
Thing that interests me is what is the best way to get status once task is completed?
Iron.io is going to do return call to my server to trigger job, and once that job completes I need to notify user about that...
How could I store this responses, and still be aware of job its related to, because there will be number of different job types?
I would like to hear how did you implement this.
Thanks

As Joseph pointed out in the comments, you'll need to:
Hopefully have a job quick enough for it to be finished when a user is still in browser
Use some sort of way to PUSH data back to your web browser.
The popular methods are:
Websockets
Server-sent events
Long polling - with ajax

Related

How to handle responses which take more then 5 seconds

For the google actions that i am developing some responses are complex and take more than 5 seconds to process.
Could someone please suggest how can this be handled.
Generally i would consider using loading dots and then replacing that message with the result but i don't see any Google Action API for it. Also is there any endpoint to which we could async send back the result later ?
Thanks
PS: I am using Conversation API.
We don't really have a good way to handle this right now, but we have a couple of approaches that sorta work based on your needs.
Notifications are currently available for the Assistant on smartphones, and they're coming for speakers. In some cases, it might make sense to say that you're working on the problem and you'll send a notification when you have it, and then resume the conversation from the notification.
Another approach is to use the Media Response to play a bit of "hold music". At the end of the segment of music, your webhook will get a notice that the music has completed. If you have the result available, you can report it at that time.

how to add progress message in google home dialogflow

In my conversation dialogflow, I would like to add some progress messages like hang in with me, I'm looking up for that data or similar in the conversation. Is there any guidance or best practice to do this?
Unfortunately, there is no good way to do this at this time. If your webhook takes longer than about 5 seconds, Dialogflow will return one of the default responses it is set with. If you're not using Dialogflow, the Action SDK will say your webhook isn't responding and will close the conversation.
There is currently no way to send a reply, and then send another reply without the user saying something first.
One workaround might be to have the default response be something like "I'm looking that information up. Ask me again in a few seconds." When your lookup finally completes, cache the information so when/if the user asks the question again, you can return it more quickly.
Depending how long it takes, you may also wish to register a dynamic reprompt. This will send an event to your webhook if the user doesn't say anything. In a situation like this, they may say nothing for a few seconds, but that may be long enough for you to have computed the reply. So after a few seconds of silence you can suddenly announce "I've figured it out, the answer you were looking for is..." or something similar. This has some limitations - you can only reprompt twice like this before Google sends you a final reprompt and closes the conversation.
Although the platform does support notifications, these are still in developer preview and don't work with all devices. They also don't quite continue the conversation (it doesn't just start talking) - they just send a notification to a phone that there is a message and that they can restart the conversation. Depending on your use case, this may be useful combined with the above.
Update
The Media Response includes a feature that we can take advantage of to handle this. Similar to the dynamic reprompt method above, you'll get a call automatically when the media you're playing ends. So you can play a short "hold music" and your webhook will be called when it is finished. You can then either give the result or say you're still working on it and play more hold music.

Intro to Event Queues for Web App

I'm trying to implement a basic but flexible "event queue" so that my web app can go run subs asynchronously. The way I have working for me now is the app writes a record to an "event queue" table in my database with info on what to do and when to fire. Then I have a daemon script that queries that table periodically and if something needs to be done, it fires it off.
I'd like to start moving towards watchers using something like AnyEvent or EV so I'm not hitting my database so often, but try as I might, I can't find good info on "best practices" for setting something like this up. AnyEvent's documentation is pretty good, but it seems to assume you know how your events should be passed around...which I don't.
What should my watcher be watching? A file? If so, what should be in that file? I don't need to send a whole bunch of data around, I just basically need something that says, "go off and run this sub right now"
I would greatly appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.
EDIT:
It's been requested that I be more specific: The events I'm trying to fire are various. Sometimes it's an email that needs sending, sometimes it's some DB work, sometimes I just need an action to be delayed for a few hours or days. In all cases, I have some sort of backend script to handle the action, I just need a way for my frontend (web app) to tell my backend, "hey I need you to go do this in x minutes" or "I need you to do this now"
You might look at Mojolicious which is built to be non-blocking and respond asynchronously. It even uses EV internally if you have it installed. To get started read the doc for Mojolicious::Lite and then the Guides (in order) from here: http://mojolicio.us/perldoc
So what is it that you are actually trying to do? Until you describe what it is you actually need, I can't help you any further that that.
There are some CPAN modules in order to run asynchronous tasks via message queues. Examples:
Queue::DBI
POE::Component::MessageQueue
Any::MQ

Best way of implementing a batch like operation in a RESTful architecture?

We have a predominantly RESTful architecture for our product. This enables us to nicely implement almost all of the required functionality, except this new requirement thats come in.
I need to implement a page which lets the user to large scale DB operations synchronously. They can stop the operation in between, if they realized they made a mistake (rather than waiting for it to complete and doing an undo operation)
I was wondering if some one could give some pointers as to what would be the best way to implement such a functionality?
Cheers!
Nirav
How about a resource that encapsulates a set of batch operations? Creating the resource means kicking off the operations (data to indicate what the operations should do is submitted via POST). Updating the resource allows stopping it or modifying it while processing.
I would kick off the large operation in a separate thread. Show the user a constantly updated status of the thread, along with a Cancel button. If the user clicks the Cancel button, you kill thread.
This is the way I've implemented similar things in the past.
The idea is to give them their control back immediately, but don't let them do anything else until the thread is complete except cancel.
In generic terms, you need a "job queue" and a way to manage the queue.
You need to integrate a batch manager, or implement your own. There are several products that can help you. As an example, read this article
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0801_vignola/0801_vignola.html

How to use a WF DelayActivity in an ASP.Net web based workflow

I have a web application that I am adding workflow functionality to using Windows Workflow Foundation. I have based my solution around K. Scott Allen's Orders Workflow example on OdeToCode. At the start I didn't realise the significance of the caveat "if you use Delay activities with and configure active timers for the manual scheduling service, these events will happen on a background thread that is not associated with an HTTP request". I now need to use Delay activities and it doesn't work as is with his solution architecture. Has anyone come across this and found a good solution to this? The example is linked to from a lot of places but I haven't seen anyone else come across this issue and it seems like a bit of a show stopper to me.
Edit: The problem is that the results from the workflow are returned to the the web application via HttpContext. I am using the ManualWorkflowSchedulerService with the useActiveTimers and this works fine for most situations because workflow events are fired from the web app and HttpContext still exists when the workflow results are returned and the web app can continue processing. When a delay activity is used processing happens on a background thread and when it tries to return results to the web app, there is no valid HttpContext (because there has been no Http Request), so further processing fails. That is, the webapp is trying to process the workflow results but there has been no http request.
I think I need to do all post Delay activity processing within the workflow rather than handing off to the web app.
Cheers.
You didn't describe the problem you are having. But maybe this is of some help.
You can use the ManualWorkflowSchedulerService with the useActiveTimers and the workflow will continue on another thread. Normally this is fine because your HTTP request has already finished and it doesn't really matter.
If however you need full control the workflow runtime will let you get a handle on all loaded workflows using the GetLoadedWorkflows() function. This will return acollection of WorkflowInstance objects. usign these you can can call the GetWorkflowNextTimerExpiration() to check which is expired. If one is you can manually resume it. In this case you want to use the ManualWorkflowSchedulerService with the useActiveTimers=false so you can control the last thread as well. However in most cases using useActiveTimers=true works perfectly well.