JavaSpaces™ Principles, Patterns, and Practice

5.3. Beyond Message Passing

Now that we've gotten a taste of simple space-based communication and have learned a little about loose coupling and its benefits, we are going to explore some more advanced forms of communication through spaces, starting with a distributed data structure known as a channel. A channel is often referred to as a “stream,” but given that the Java application environment already has a well-defined notion of a stream, we will stick to the name channel.

Think of a channel as an information conduit that takes a series of messages at one end and delivers them at the other end, while maintaining their ordering. At the input end, a channel may have one or many processes sending messages. At the output end, there may be one or ...