Acceptor-Connector An Object Creational Pattern for Connecting and Initializing Communication Services

The Acceptor-Connector design pattern decouples connection establishment and service initialization in a distributed system from the processing performed once a service is initialized. This decoupling is achieved with three components: acceptors, connectors, and service handlers. A connector actively establishes a connection with a remote acceptor component and initializes a service handler to process data exchanged on the connection. Likewise, an acceptor passively waits for connection requests from remote connectors, establishing a connection upon arrival of such a request, and initializing a service handler to process data exchanged on the connection. The initialized service handlers then perform application-specific processing and communicate via the connection established by the connector and acceptor components.