[Ace-users] [ace-users] Basic Reactor concepts

[Douglas C. Schmidt]

Hi Gonzo,

> Again, I am trying to lessen my ignorance here...

Always a laudable goal ;-)

> Although I have always seen the Reactor as a key piece in the Acceptor
> / Connector / Svc_Handler class family in ACE, used to process I/O, a
> Reactor seems to be a generic concept for solving the following
> requirement, right?
> 
> "Decouple the reception of events from its processing, in a way that,
> for instance, makes it possible to receive events in one thread and
> process them in a different thread".

This is actually a different set of POSA2 patterns, e.g.,
Half-Sync/Half-Async or Active Object.  You should start by reading
about them.  The Reactor pattern can be used as part of the
implementation of Half-Sync/Half-Async pattern.

> Now, for me to understand this better, let me pose an example to you and
> maybe someone can indicate, if I am correct, how such an example would
> be handled with a Reactor. Say I have N message queues; they are all
> filled via some kind of opaque process which does not concern us, except
> for the fact that each queue is filled totally independent from the
> others (for example, one queue could store mouse events, another could
> store serial port incoming data, etc.). Now, I wish to have M threads
> (M != N) running in parallel, with an identical, simple infinite loop
> that will fetch an event from a queue that has signalled it has events
> available, and then process this event.
> 
> If I am right in my assumptions about the Reactor's purpose in life, 

This isn't really the Reactor's purpose in life, unless those N queues
happen to be the appropriate type of OS handle than can be waited upon
together via a "synchronous event demuxer".

> how do I wire things in this scenario in order to have the N queues
> use a Reactor to notify the M threads for processing?

I think you're better off using the Half-Sync/Half-Async pattern here,
so please start by looking at it first.

Thanks,

        Doug