This article describes the Active Object design pattern. This is a concurrency design pattern, a category of design pattern used by software engineers, when writing computer programs.
The Active Object pattern is a design pattern, used in software engineering to manage multiple concurrent processes on separate threads or even different machines. It does this my "decoupling the method from it's invocation", meaning the method is triggered as the result of a scheduled message, through a queue, rather than directly. This pattern is asynchronous in execution. First, a call is made to the Proxy, which is the only publicly visible part to the pattern. The proxy makes the Method Request, which contains "context information" about the method. This is passed to a Scheduler. The method is now decoupled and on the scheduler thread. The scheduler decides which order to queue the Method Requests in the Activation Queue. When the Scheduler picks up and executes a Method Request from the Activation Queue, it uses a Servant to do the actual work. Finally a Future (or Callback) is used to receive the returning data.
This pattern enhances concurrency. It also makes synchronised access of multi-threaded proceses much simpler.
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