Blogs:JaroslavTulach:Practical Design:Request/Response Pattern Revisited

From APIDesign

Request/Response Pattern Revisited

TheAPIBook explains how Request/Response pattern can help to solve the need for growing parameters. However, this is not all the pattern can help with as I have found recently in a discussion with David Šimonek.

David was just designing new Quick Search API for NetBeans which was a natural candidate for using the Request/Response pattern. However he needed more. He needed support for incremental computation, as some of the providers may compute too long. He needed a way to process some of the results as soon as possible, as he wanted to show user first five lines of results as quickly as possible. And also he needed a way to support interruption of already computing tasks, because, as soon as user selects a result of search, it is useless to continue computing additional ones. To our surprise we found the Request/Response naturally suited for these tasks as well.

This also shows the difference between TheAPIBook and this website. The book is printed once, sentenced to contain forever what it contained on the day of publication. But our knowledge is evolving, growing. It is perfect to have a place where we can capture and improve what we know about the Request/Response pattern...

--JaroslavTulach 21:02, 25 June 2008 (UTC)