[Os-project-managers] talking points for December 22

[Kipp Martin]

Hi Gus:

I have been spending a fair a amount of time thinking about what we have 
discussed the last week or so and have some talking points for out meeting:

1) It would be nice to have in the OS library a class such as the 
OSSolver class that modeling language developers could use in order to 
invoke OS. For example, right now Mike Steglich with CMPL calls 
OSSolverService at the command line and passes it files. It would 
obviously be more convenient and efficient to be able to link to the OS 
library directly and invoke the service methods directly. Writing a 
large file to the command line is not as efficient as invoking the 
service methods in memory. Indeed, for large files there could be a 
large hit. A user of OS currently cannot do that conveniently.  One can 
think of OSAmplClient in this vein also. OSAmplClient can be thought of 
as AMPL invoking OS only we are writing the code not David Gay. Bill 
Hart may want to use something like this also.

2) We also have a more complicated animal which is the interactive shell 
in OSSolverService.

What to do?

I suggest we create a class, maybe call it OSServiceMethods and it does 
just that, it executes one of our six service methods. My thinking is 
that it will have a data member OSOptionsStruc. It is not clear to me 
whether it should create its own OSOptionsStruc, or be passed one in the 
constructor.

We keep OSSolverService pretty much as is with regard to the interactive 
shell. However, what changes is that OSSolverService always uses 
OSServiceMethods when it executes a service methods. OSSolverService 
would no longer have a kill, solve, send, etc. Likewise OSAmplClient 
would work by parsing a command line, filling in an OSOptinosStruc and 
then calls OSServiceMethods. I still maintain that OSOptionsStruc should 
NOT have any methods. It is a data holder.

Cheers


-- 
Kipp Martin
Professor of Operations Research
and Computing Technology
Booth School of Business
University of Chicago
5807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
773-702-7456
kmartin at chicagobooth.edu
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/bio.aspx?person_id=12825325568
http://projects.coin-or.org/OS

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