SCXML question: state reduction implementation?

["J.-F. Rompre" <jr...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

My apologies if this is already provided, but I couldn't find it in the
current docs/FAQs/tutorials I looked at on the project site.

Are the states internally reduced/optimized whenever possible ? If, so
ideally this would be transparent to the client code/XML for verification
purposes.

As an example, an XML describing 100 states and many more possible
transitions, might be reduced to 30 states, but
no source XML changes would be needed (e.g. translation between defined and
optimized might occur in the Bridge).

If not done internally, that would be a great capability to add, and would
allow Domain specifications to remain expressive.

Thank you,

JF

Re: SCXML question: state reduction implementation?

[Rahul Akolkar <ra...@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 1:16 PM, J.-F. Rompre <jr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My apologies if this is already provided, but I couldn't find it in the
> current docs/FAQs/tutorials I looked at on the project site.
>
> Are the states internally reduced/optimized whenever possible ?
<snip/>

No attempt is made at any reduction or optimization.


> If, so
> ideally this would be transparent to the client code/XML for verification
> purposes.
>
<snap/>

Yes, there are a host of considerations:
 * Transparency (as you indicate above)
 * Predictability (rules would have to be well documented)
 * Round-tripping (reduced vs. authored versions)
 * Semantics equivalence (proofs thereof)
 * Debugging
 * etc. (not a complete list)


> As an example, an XML describing 100 states and many more possible
> transitions, might be reduced to 30 states, but
> no source XML changes would be needed (e.g. translation between defined and
> optimized might occur in the Bridge).
>
<snip/>

Possibly.


> If not done internally, that would be a great capability to add, and would
> allow Domain specifications to remain expressive.
>
<snap/>

I suspect it is a modest amount of work, and there are no plans to do
this within Commons SCXML. If someone else wants to do it and
contribute back [1], we'd be happy to consider it as an enhancement.
We'd probably need a basic mechanism to specify the domain specific
reduction "rules" and a pre-parser to apply the rules (could be part
of the bridging code as you mention or a more first-class notion
within the library), while keeping the above considerations in mind to
provide a reasonable development experience.

-Rahul

[1] http://commons.apache.org/scxml/issue-tracking.html


> Thank you,
>
> JF
>

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