An active object framework is a callback-based form of multitasking for computer systems. Specifically, it is a form of cooperative multitasking and is an important feature of the Symbian operating system.
In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result, a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and main memory. Multitasking automatically interrupts the running program, saving its state and loading the saved state of another program and transferring control to it. This "context switch" may be initiated at fixed time intervals, or the running program may be coded to signal to the supervisory software when it can be interrupted.
Cooperative multitasking, also known as non-preemptive multitasking, is a style of computer multitasking in which the operating system never initiates a context switch from a running process to another process. Instead, processes voluntarily yield control periodically or when idle or logically blocked in order to enable multiple applications to be run concurrently. This type of multitasking is called "cooperative" because all programs must cooperate for the entire scheduling scheme to work. In this scheme, the process scheduler of an operating system is known as a cooperative scheduler, having its role reduced down to starting the processes and letting them return control back to it voluntarily.
Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. Symbian was originally developed as a closed-source OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS was a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and ran exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010—at a time when smartphones were in limited use—when it was overtaken by Android, as Google and its partners achieved wide adoption. It was notably not as popular in North America.
Within the framework, active objects may make requests of asynchronous services (e.g. sending an SMS message). When an asynchronous request is made, control is returned to the calling object immediately (i.e. without waiting for the call to complete). The caller may choose to do other things before it returns control back to the operating system, which typically schedules other tasks or puts the machine to sleep. When it makes the request, the calling object includes a reference to itself.
In computer science, an object can be a variable, a data structure, a function, or a method, and as such, is a value in memory referenced by an identifier.
In computer science, asynchronous I/O is a form of input/output processing that permits other processing to continue before the transmission has finished.
When the asynchronous task completes, the operating system identifies the thread containing the requesting active object, and wakes it up. An "active scheduler" in the thread identifies the object that made the request, and passes control back to that object.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs.
The implementation of active objects in Symbian is based around each thread having a "request semaphore". This is incremented when a thread makes an asynchronous request, and decremented when the request is completed. When there are no outstanding requests, the thread is put to sleep.
In computer science, a semaphore is a variable or abstract data type used to control access to a common resource by multiple processes in a concurrent system such as a multitasking operating system. A semaphore is simply a variable. This variable is used to solve critical section problems and to achieve process synchronization in the multi processing environment. A trivial semaphore is a plain variable that is changed depending on programmer-defined conditions.
In practice there may be many active objects in a thread, each doing its own task. They can interact by requesting things of each other, and of active objects in other threads. They may even request things of themselves.
This is an implementation of a very old idea that was developed to handle software interruptions in the 70s. The operating system was acting as the first object and the peripheral as the second one.
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is any operating system (OS) intended to serve real-time applications that process data as it comes in, typically without buffer delays. Processing time requirements are measured in tenths of seconds or shorter increments of time.
A real time system is a time bound system which has well defined fixed time constraints. Processing must be done within the defined constraints or the system will fail.
They either are event driven or time sharing. Event driven systems switch between tasks based on their priorities while time sharing systems switch the task based on clock interrupts. Most RTOS’s use a pre-emptive scheduling algorithm.
In computing, a process is the instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its activity. Depending on the operating system (OS), a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems, but in most cases a thread is a component of a process. Multiple threads can exist within one process, executing concurrently and sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non-thread-local global variables at any given time.
In computing, scheduling is the method by which work specified by some means is assigned to resources that complete the work. The work may be virtual computation elements such as threads, processes or data flows, which are in turn scheduled onto hardware resources such as processors, network links or expansion cards.
In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. Group communication systems provide similar kinds of functionality.
In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements, arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next; the name is by analogy to a physical pipeline. Usually some amount of buffering is provided between consecutive elements. The information that flows in these pipelines is often a stream of records, bytes, or bits, and the elements of a pipeline may be called filters; this is also called the pipes and filters design pattern. Connecting elements into a pipeline is analogous to function composition.
In computing, a task is a unit of execution or a unit of work. The term is ambiguous; precise alternative terms include process, light-weight process, thread, step, request, or query. In the adjacent diagram, there are queues of incoming work to do and outgoing completed work, and a thread pool of threads to perform this work. Either the work units themselves or the threads that perform the work can be referred to as "tasks", and these can be referred to respectively as requests/responses/threads, incoming tasks/completed tasks/threads, or requests/responses/tasks.
The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant operating system, which has been designed to work with uniprocessor and symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP)-based computers. To process input/output (I/O) requests, they use packet-driven I/O, which utilizes I/O request packets (IRPs) and asynchronous I/O. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft began making 64-bit versions of Windows available; before this, these operating systems only existed in 32-bit versions.
In computing, preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting a task being carried out by a computer system, without requiring its cooperation, and with the intention of resuming the task at a later time. Such changes of the executed task are known as context switches. It is normally carried out by a privileged task or part of the system known as a preemptive scheduler, which has the power to preempt, or interrupt, and later resume, other tasks in the system.
Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed during overlapping time periods—concurrently—instead of sequentially. This is a property of a system—this may be an individual program, a computer, or a network—and there is a separate execution point or "thread of control" for each computation ("process"). A concurrent system is one where a computation can advance without waiting for all other computations to complete.
The active object design pattern decouples method execution from method invocation for objects that each reside in their own thread of control. The goal is to introduce concurrency, by using asynchronous method invocation and a scheduler for handling requests.
In computer science, a fiber is a particularly lightweight thread of execution.
ProActive Parallel Suite is an open-source software for enterprise workload orchestration, part of the OW2 community. A workflow model allows to define the set of executables and scripts written in any scripting language along with their dependencies, so ProActive Parallel Suite can schedule and orchestrate executions while optimising the use of computational resources.
Parallel Extensions was the development name for a managed concurrency library developed by a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the CLR team at Microsoft. The library was released in version 4.0 of the .NET Framework. It is composed of two parts: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (TPL). It also consists of a set of coordination data structures (CDS) – sets of data structures used to synchronize and co-ordinate the execution of concurrent tasks.
The front controller software design pattern is listed in several pattern catalogs and related to the design of web applications. It is "a controller that handles all requests for a website", which is a useful structure for web application developers to achieve the flexibility and reuse without code redundancy.
In multithreaded computer programming, asynchronous method invocation (AMI), also known as asynchronous method calls or the asynchronous pattern is a design pattern in which the call site is not blocked while waiting for the called code to finish. Instead, the calling thread is notified when the reply arrives. Polling for a reply is an undesired option.
QP is a family of lightweight, open source software frameworks for building responsive and modular real-time embedded applications as systems of cooperating, event-driven active objects (actors).
Join-patterns provides a way to write concurrent, parallel and distributed computer programs by message passing. Compared to the use of threads and locks, this is a high level programming model using communication constructs model to abstract the complexity of concurrent environment and to allow scalability. Its focus is on the execution of a chord between messages atomically consumed from a group of channels.
