Now whenever I hear of a friend who's lost a loved one, I no longer call with the polite offer, "If there's anything I can do…" Instead I try to think of one specific task that suits that man's need, like taking the dog to the boarding kennel, or house sitting during the funeral.

The application is now reduced to a simple call to a stored procedure and the task of outputting the result to the browser.

You can think of a long-running process as a workflow process; it may wait for an external event to happen, or call upon one or more people to perform a task.