Active object: an object behavioral pattern for concurrent programming
R. Greg Lavender, Douglas C. Schmidt · 1996
This paper describes the Active Object pattern, which decouples method execution from method invocation in order to simplify synchronized access to an object that resides in its own thread of control. The Active Object pattern allows one or more independent threads of execution to interleave their access to data modeled as a single object. A broad class of producer/consumer and reader/writer applications are well-suited to this model of concurrency. This pattern is commonly used in distributed systems requiring multi-threaded servers. In addition, client applications, such as windowing systems and network browsers, employ active objects to simplify concurrent, asynchronous network operations.