Abstract

Complex software systems are composed of interacting components. These components collaborate to implement abstractions, such as "packets" in a networking system or "virtual memory page" in a virtual memory system. This pattern focuses on organizing the communication infrastructure used by the components, so that communicating components can be added or removed with minimal changes. At the same time, the communication overhead is minimized. 1 Intent Structure inter-component communication in a system so that loosely coupled components make minimal assumptions about the communication infrastructure, while tightly coupled components localize their interactions. 2 Motivation To motivate the pattern, consider the implementation of networking systems and virtual memory systems. Networking systems are typically implemented as subsystems "layered" on top of one another. In this case, the individual layers are our components, and they operate on a single logical resource, the packet. We are...

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