--- Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
How about "io_service"? That seems both narrowly focused and about the right level to me.
I've changed "io_system" to "io_service" in your text below. Reads quite well IMO.
I like it, except for the following statement:
- An io_service object is an extensible collection of I/O services (drivers?).
Perhaps io_services would be better? To continue the high-latency brainstorming... Following on from Peter's suggestion of driver, and in light of io_services vs io_service, what about io_kernel, which is a collection of drivers? Might sound too low level though. Regarding Arkadiy's suggestion, I'm not sure about just dispatcher, although maybe io_dispatcher is ok. But I don't think it conveys the collection of services idea sufficiently -- unless it refers to a dispatcher from the Client-Dispatcher-Server pattern :) I did some reading up on patterns during the break; mostly Pattern Oriented Software Architecture volume 1. The one pattern that stands out is the Broker pattern, even though it is intended for distributed applications. I believe that asio implements a variant of this pattern. The relevant parts include: - A Client (the application) sends requests through a Client-side Proxy (e.g. stream_socket). - A Client-side Proxy encapsulates functionality and mediates between the Client and the Broker. - A Broker registers and locates Servers (get_service()) and runs an event loop (run()). It provides a way for the results of operations to be forwarded back to Clients (e.g. dispatch() and post()). - A Server implements services, and is registered with a Broker. Some Servers are implemented locally to the client (e.g. locking_dispatcher_service) and others can be located on a remote Broker. In this case you could consider that the remote Broker is a virtual Broker that exists within the operating system. So what about io_broker? For people who have used CORBA, similar rules apply in respect of calling run(): - No need to call run() in a client making synchronous calls. - Need to call run() if using asynchronous method invocation so that results can be delivered. A possible disadvantage of io_broker is that the name conveys too much meaning, in that users may feel it is a concept they need to understand before using the facilities it provides. I don't think a name like io_services suffers from this. Cheers, Chris