Title: A design pattern for real time progress monitoring of a time-intensive process in a stateless software application

Authors: Md. Mohaimenuzzaman; S.M. Monzurur Rahman

Addresses: United International University, House # 80, Road # 8/A, Dhanmondi, Dhaka-1209, Bangladesh ' Samsung R&D Institute Bangladesh, 111, Bir Uttam C. R. Dutta Road, Dhaka-1205, Bangladesh

Abstract: As stateless software applications run based on request and response to and from a server, it depends on the server processes to manage concurrent requests and its session state. In the cases, where there are modifications to the session state, the server will have to handle the requests synchronously to prevent many issues relating to race conditions. The server components usually have a maximum execution timeout for requests to finish its execution. It is possible to extend this limit but it may open a security threat for the application as it is now more susceptible to denial of service attacks. With these limitations, we propose a pattern to allow for time-intensive processes to run in a stateless application and the ability to monitor their progress in real time with other capabilities such as stopping, pausing and resuming the background task.

Keywords: Ajax; asynchronous processing; design patterns; multi-threading; real time monitoring; time-intensive processes; stateless software applications; uninterrupted processes; threading; web applications; web servers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSETA.2015.067530

International Journal of Software Engineering, Technology and Applications, 2015 Vol.1 No.1, pp.53 - 63

Received: 16 Jan 2014
Accepted: 18 Mar 2014
Published online: 18 Mar 2015 *