Hi Giovanni, On 10/18/06, Giovanni P. Deretta <gpderetta@gmail.com> wrote:
Dean Michael Berris wrote:
Insights and pointers will be most appreciated.
[snipped]
While the road to a full active object is long, may be my library is a good start. BTW, coroutines might be a much better way, performance-wise, to implement Active Objects with one thread per object or a thread pool.
Coroutines (if I understand correctly) solve a completely different set of design challenges, mostly related to maintaining state accross reentrant calls to the coroutine -- while Active Objects [See http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/PDF/Act-Obj.pdf] just aim to decouple the method execution (of member methods) from the invocation and return values are wrapped in Futures. I had been more or less influenced by Herb Sutter's presentation on the Concur project and the idea of: active class my_class { void operation() { // do some work here }; int another_operation() { int a_value = 0; // do some work here on a_value return a_value; }; }; // somewhere in client code... my_class instance; instance.operation() // immediately returns future<int> a_value = instance.another_operation(); // immediately returns // do some other work cout << a_value.get() << std::endl; // will wait for a_value to "have a value"
You can look at the code and see if it fits your need here:
https://www.boost-consulting.com:8443/trac/soc/browser/boost/soc/2006/corout...
docs here:
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/soc/coroutine/index.html
I'm doing that at the moment and so far it's been very interesting. I might not be using this library though for our current project (or anytime soon) because we've already had a lot of code written to implement the active object pattern. It is going to be worth a second look though I bet, when it gets reviewed and maybe eventually included in Boost.
Currently real life prevent me from cleaning up the library for a boost review request, but plan to do it short term.
Good luck! :-)
HTH,
Definitely does. Thanks! :-) -- Dean Michael C. Berris C++ Software Architect Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co. web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/ email: dean@orangeandbronze.com mobile: +63 928 7291459 phone: +63 2 8943415 other: +1 408 4049532 blogs: http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com http://3w-agility.blogspot.com http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com