Acceptor and Connector A Family of Object Creational Patterns for Initializing Communication Services

This paper describes the Connector and Acceptor patterns. The intent of these patterns is to decouple the active and passive initialization roles, respectively, from the tasks a communication service performs once initialization is complete. Common examples of communication services that utilize these patterns include WWW browsers, WWW servers, object request brokers, and “superservers” (which provide services like remote loginand file transfer to client applications). This paper illustrates how the Connector and Acceptor patterns can help decouple service initialization-related processing from service processing, which yields more reusable, extensible, and efficient communication software. When used in conjunction with related patterns like the Reactor [1], Active Object [2], and Service Configurator [3], the Acceptor and Connector patterns enable the creation of extensible and efficient communication software frameworks [4] and applications [5]. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the Acceptor and Connector patterns in detail; Section 3 presents concluding remarks, and the Appendix outlines background information on networking and communication protocols necessary to understand the patterns in this paper.