The main difference between a Message-driven system with long-lived addressable components, and an Event-driven dataflow-driven model, is that Messages are inherently directed, Events are not. Messages have a clear, single, destination; while Events are facts for others to observe. Furthermore, messaging is preferably asynchronous, with the sending and the reception decoupled from the sender and receiver respectively.
Messages are needed to communicate across the network and forms the basis for communication in distributed systems, while Events, on the other hand, are emitted locally. It is common to use Messaging under the hood to bridge an Event-driven system across the network by sending Events inside Messages. This allows maintaining the relative simplicity of the Event-driven programming model in a distributed context and can work very well for specialized and well scoped use-cases (e.g., AWS Lambda, Distributed Stream Processing products like Spark Streaming, Flink, Kafka and Akka Streams over Gearpump, and Distributed Publish Subscribe products like Kafka and Kinesis).
Data Flow And Reactive Programming Systems Pdf Download
Reactive Programming is a great technique for managing internal logic and dataflow transformation, locally within the components, as a way of optimizing code clarity, performance and resource efficiency. Reactive Systems, being a set of architectural principles, puts the emphasis on distributed communication and gives us tools to tackle resilience and elasticity in distributed systems.
Another contrast to the Reactive Systems approach is that pure Reactive Programming allows decoupling in time, but not space (unless leveraging Message-passing to distribute the dataflow graph under the hood, across the network, as discussed previously).
In computer programming, flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of "black box" processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing, where the connections are specified externally to the processes. These black box processes can be reconnected endlessly to form different applications without having to be changed internally. FBP is thus naturally component-oriented.
Flow-based programming defines applications using the metaphor of a "data factory". It views an application not as a single, sequential process, which starts at a point in time, and then does one thing at a time until it is finished, but as a network of asynchronous processes communicating by means of streams of structured data chunks, called "information packets" (IPs). In this view, the focus is on the application data and the transformations applied to it to produce the desired outputs. The network is defined externally to the processes, as a list of connections which is interpreted by a piece of software, usually called the "scheduler".
Because FBP processes can continue executing as long they have data to work on and somewhere to put their output, FBP applications generally run in less elapsed time than conventional programs, and make optimal use of all the processors on a machine, with no special programming required to achieve this.[1]
The network definition is usually diagrammatic, and is converted into a connection list in some lower-level language or notation. FBP is often a visual programming language at this level. More complex network definitions have a hierarchical structure, being built up from subnets with "sticky" connections. Many other flow-based languages/runtimes are built around more traditional programming languages, the most notable[citation needed] example is RaftLib which uses C++ iostream-like operators to specify the flow graph.
FBP promotes high-level, functional style of specifications that simplify reasoning about system behavior. An example of this is the distributed data flow model for constructively specifying and analyzing the semantics of distributed multi-party protocols.
The question then arises whether FBP components can themselves be expressed using functional notation. W.H. Burge showed how stream expressions can be developed using a recursive, applicative style of programming, but this work was in terms of (streams of) atomic values.[18] In FBP, it is necessary to be able to describe and process structured data chunks (FBP IPs).
Furthermore, most applicative systems assume that all the data is available in memory at the same time, whereas FBP applications need to be able to process long-running streams of data while still using finite resources. Friedman and Wise suggested a way to do this by adding the concept of "lazy cons" to Burge's work. This removed the requirement that both of the arguments of "cons" be available at the same instant of time. "Lazy cons" does not actually build a stream until both of its arguments are realized - before that it simply records a "promise" to do this. This allows a stream to be dynamically realized from the front, but with an unrealized back end. The end of the stream stays unrealized until the very end of the process, while the beginning is an ever-lengthening sequence of items.
The Task Parallel Library (TPL) provides dataflow components to help increase the robustness of concurrency-enabled applications. These dataflow components are collectively referred to as the TPL Dataflow Library. This dataflow model promotes actor-based programming by providing in-process message passing for coarse-grained dataflow and pipelining tasks. The dataflow components build on the types and scheduling infrastructure of the TPL and integrate with the C#, Visual Basic, and F# language support for asynchronous programming. These dataflow components are useful when you have multiple operations that must communicate with one another asynchronously or when you want to process data as it becomes available. For example, consider an application that processes image data from a web camera. By using the dataflow model, the application can process image frames as they become available. If the application enhances image frames, for example, by performing light correction or red-eye reduction, you can create a pipeline of dataflow components. Each stage of the pipeline might use more coarse-grained parallelism functionality, such as the functionality that is provided by the TPL, to transform the image.
This document provides an overview of the TPL Dataflow Library. It describes the programming model, the predefined dataflow block types, and how to configure dataflow blocks to meet the specific requirements of your applications.
The TPL Dataflow Library provides a foundation for message passing and parallelizing CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive applications that have high throughput and low latency. It also gives you explicit control over how data is buffered and moves around the system. To better understand the dataflow programming model, consider an application that asynchronously loads images from disk and creates a composite of those images. Traditional programming models typically require that you use callbacks and synchronization objects, such as locks, to coordinate tasks and access to shared data. By using the dataflow programming model, you can create dataflow objects that process images as they are read from disk. Under the dataflow model, you declare how data is handled when it becomes available, and also any dependencies between data. Because the runtime manages dependencies between data, you can often avoid the requirement to synchronize access to shared data. In addition, because the runtime schedules work based on the asynchronous arrival of data, dataflow can improve responsiveness and throughput by efficiently managing the underlying threads. For an example that uses the dataflow programming model to implement image processing in a Windows Forms application, see Walkthrough: Using Dataflow in a Windows Forms Application.
The TPL Dataflow Library consists of dataflow blocks, which are data structures that buffer and process data. The TPL defines three kinds of dataflow blocks: source blocks, target blocks, and propagator blocks. A source block acts as a source of data and can be read from. A target block acts as a receiver of data and can be written to. A propagator block acts as both a source block and a target block, and can be read from and written to. The TPL defines the System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.ISourceBlock interface to represent sources, System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.ITargetBlock to represent targets, and System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.IPropagatorBlock to represent propagators. IPropagatorBlock inherits from both ISourceBlock, and ITargetBlock.
The TPL Dataflow Library provides several predefined dataflow block types that implement the ISourceBlock, ITargetBlock, and IPropagatorBlock interfaces. These dataflow block types are described in this document in the section Predefined Dataflow Block Types.
You can connect dataflow blocks to form pipelines, which are linear sequences of dataflow blocks, or networks, which are graphs of dataflow blocks. A pipeline is one form of network. In a pipeline or network, sources asynchronously propagate data to targets as that data becomes available. The ISourceBlock.LinkTo method links a source dataflow block to a target block. A source can be linked to zero or more targets; targets can be linked from zero or more sources. You can add or remove dataflow blocks to or from a pipeline or network concurrently. The predefined dataflow block types handle all thread-safety aspects of linking and unlinking.
For an example that connects dataflow blocks to form a basic pipeline, see Walkthrough: Creating a Dataflow Pipeline. For an example that connects dataflow blocks to form a more complex network, see Walkthrough: Using Dataflow in a Windows Forms Application. For an example that unlinks a target from a source after the source offers the target a message, see How to: Unlink Dataflow Blocks.
When you call the ISourceBlock.LinkTo method to link a source to a target, you can supply a delegate that determines whether the target block accepts or rejects a message based on the value of that message. This filtering mechanism is a useful way to guarantee that a dataflow block receives only certain values. For most of the predefined dataflow block types, if a source block is connected to multiple target blocks, when a target block rejects a message, the source offers that message to the next target. The order in which a source offers messages to targets is defined by the source and can vary according to the type of the source. Most source block types stop offering a message after one target accepts that message. One exception to this rule is the BroadcastBlock class, which offers each message to all targets, even if some targets reject the message. For an example that uses filtering to process only certain messages, see Walkthrough: Using Dataflow in a Windows Forms Application. 2ff7e9595c
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