Reactive Design Patterns

Chapter 5. Location transparency

The previous chapter introduced message passing as a way to decouple collaborating objects. Making communication asynchronous and nonblocking instead of calling synchronous methods enables the receiver to perform its work in a different execution context, such as a different thread. But why stop at interactions within one computer? Message passing works the same way in both local and remote interactions. There is no fundamental difference between scheduling a task to run later on the local machine and sending a network packet to a different host to trigger execution there. In this chapter, we will explore the possibilities offered by this perspective as well as the consequences it has for quantitative aspects ...