Message passing
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In computer science, message passing is a form of communication used in concurrent programming, parallel programming, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. Communication is made by the sending of messages to recipients. Forms of messages include function invocation, signals, and data packets. Prominent models of computation based on message passing include the Actor model and the process calculi.
Microkernel operating systems pass messages between one kernel and one or more server blocks.
Distributed object and remote method invocation systems like ONC RPC, Corba, Java RMI, DCOM, SOAP, .NET Remoting and similar are message passing systems. The term is also used in High Performance Computing using Message Passing Interface.
The concept of message passing is also used in Bayesian inference over Graphical models.
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[edit] Overview
Message passing systems have been called "shared nothing" systems because the message passing abstraction hides underlying state changes that may be used in the implementation of sending messages.
Message passing model based programming languages typically define messaging (see message passing) as the (usually asynchronous) sending (usually by copy) of a data item to a communication endpoint (Actor, process, thread, socket, etc.). Such messaging is used in Web Services by SOAP. This concept is the higher-level version of a datagram except that messages can be larger than a packet and can optionally be made reliable, durable, secure, and/or transacted.
Messages are also commonly used in the same sense as a means of interprocess communication; the other common technique being streams or pipes, in which data are sent as a sequence of elementary data items instead (the higher-level version of a virtual circuit).
[edit] Examples of Message passing style
[edit] Influences on other programming models
[edit] OOP
In the terminology of some object-oriented languages, a message is the single means to pass control to an object. If the object 'responds' to the message, it has a method for that message.
Sending the same message to an object twice will usually result in the object applying the method twice. Two messages are considered to be the same message type, if the name and the arguments of the message are identical.
Objects can send messages to other objects from within their method bodies. In most languages that support object orientation, however, the sender of a message can be code that doesn't belong to any specific object as well.
Alan Kay has suggested that he placed too much emphasis on objects themselves and not enough on the messages being sent between them. Message passing enables extreme late binding in systems.
[edit] Structured Programming
The equivalent in conventional (procedural, imperative, or problem-oriented) programming languages to a message is a function call.
Note that message is a function call, not the function or the signature of the function (i.e. formal parameters plus name), and not the function instance resulting from the call, so to 'send the message' means to 'call the function'. See message for other meanings, e.g. in communications protocols.
[edit] Other
Some languages support the forwarding or delegation of method invocations from one object to another if the former has no method to handle the message, but 'knows' another object that may have one.
[edit] Examples
Such messaging is used in Web Services by SOAP. Actor based systems
[edit] History
In 1977, Carl Hewitt put forward the thesis that computational control structures can be viewed as patterns of passing messages.[1]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Hewitt, Carl (June 1977). "Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages" (pdf). Journal of Artificial Intelligence.
- Ramachandran, U.; M. Solomon, M. Vernon (1987). "Hardware support for interprocess communication". Proceedings of the 14th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, ACM Press.
- McQuillan, John M.; David C. Walden (1975). "Some considerations for a high performance message-based interprocess communication system". Proceedings of the 1975 ACM SIGCOMM/SIGOPS workshop on Interprocess communications, ACM Press.
- Shimizu, Toshiyuki; Takeshi Horie, Hiroaki Ishihata (1992). "Low-latency message communication support for the AP1000". Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, ACM Press.
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