Active Object concurrency pattern

[iluwatar]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_object

[iluwatar]

Thinking in Java book

[hannomalie]

I'll give it a try :)

[hannomalie]

I pushed a module in a new branch. Since I wasn't satisfied with the simple "I have my own thread"-implementation one can find everywhere, I implemented return values with futures and a task queue as well.

Would be glad if I get some comments. If the code is good, I will add readme and uml stuff.

Thanks :)

[iluwatar]

Real world example: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.1/java/typed-actors.html

[Rzeposlaw]

Hello, can I work on this now?

[iluwatar]

Ok @Rzeposlaw it is yours.

[tzutalin]

@Rzeposlaw,
It will be nice to explain the difference between active object pattern and event-driven-architecture/event-asynchronous.

[isabiq]

I think the two patterns have some similarities but they are different in many aspects. The main goal of the event asynchronous is to hide the complexity of a multi-threaded design. Normally, a user want to execute his tasks asynchronously so he delegates the tasks to another objects that control and supervise the execution of these tasks. For me, The pattern has a really narrow use case, and I see it mainly used in GUI applications when performing short background operations and publishing results to the UI thread.

For the active object it is a pattern used to decouple method invocation from its execution. It is a complex pattern that hold in its implementation other patterns. So here, it is about a client calling a proxy to benefit from a certain service not delegating a task of his. Also, while both pattern use multi-threaded environments, the active object introduces other concepts, like a scheduler which provide another layer of managing and prioritizing requests, a servant for defining the behavior and state, and also method requests and activation queue.

[iluwatar]

@Rzeposlaw are you still implementing this?

[iluwatar]

This issue is free again

[noamgrinch]

Hey, @iluwatar I have implemented this pattern and ready to push to my branch.
May I please get permissions to commit and push?

[noamgrinch]

@iluwatar ?

[iluwatar]

@noamgrinch please follow the normal Github forking workflow. You don't need write access to this repository, you can fork it on your own account and propose changes from there. See Github's documentation.