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/*
* Copyright 2006 - 2015
* Stefan Balev
* Julien Baudry
* Antoine Dutot
* Yoann Pigné
* Guilhelm Savin
*
* This file is part of GraphStream .
*
* GraphStream is a library whose purpose is to handle static or dynamic
* graph, create them from scratch, file or any source and display them.
*
* This program is free software distributed under the terms of two licenses, the
* CeCILL-C license that fits European law, and the GNU Lesser General Public
* License. You can use, modify and/ or redistribute the software under the terms
* of the CeCILL-C license as circulated by CEA, CNRS and INRIA at the following
* URL or under the terms of the GNU LGPL as published by
* the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
* option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
* WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
* PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
* along with this program. If not, see
* A proxy is a kind of event buffer that allows to pass some kind of barrier.
* The barrier can be a thread or a network for example. A proxy completely
* decouple the source from the sink. The proxy buffers the source events and
* when possible it sends them to the listeners at the sink. In other words, a
* proxy is indirect, non synchronized and non blocking.
*
*
*
* The usual source/sink mechanism is synchronized, direct and blocking : when
* the event occurs, all listeners are called, and we have to wait they finish
* to process these events to continue and send new events.
*
*
*
* With proxies, there is a buffer often compared to a mail box. Each event
* produced as source is buffered and when the sink is free to receive these
* events it can check the mail box and empty it, thus receiving the pending
* events. This way of doing is completely non synchronized and non blocking
* (due to the mail box).
*
*
*
* This way of doing allows for example to pass a thread frontier with a minimum
* of synchronization : only the mail box has to be synchronized. And the source
* and sink can most of the time run in parallel. Without such a proxy, we would
* have to synchronize the whole graph, and threads would consume their time
* waiting one another since most of the work in GraphStream is centered on
* graphs.
*
*
*
* For networks, this is the same thing : events are buffered before sending
* them to the network. When the other end is ready it can check these events in
* one operation.
*
*
*
* However proxies have a limitation : they force the receiving end to check for
* events regularly. This can be compared to "pumping" since the whole
* GraphStream metaphor is a set of sources, pipes and sinks. Here instead of
* flowing freely, the event stream must be pumped manually to receive it. This
* is however most of the time not a problem since most work on graphs in
* GraphStream is dynamic and runs iteratively.
*
*/
public interface ProxyPipe extends Pipe {
/**
* Check if some events are pending and dispatch them to the registered
* outputs.
*/
void pump();
/**
* Same as {@link #pump()} but try to block until new events were available.
* Note that this feature will not be available on all proxy pipe
* implementation and may throws an
* {@link java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException}. It can throw an
* {@link java.lang.InterruptedException} if the current thread is
* interrupted while proxy is waiting for events.
*/
void blockingPump() throws InterruptedException;
/**
* Same as {@link #blockingPump()} but including a timeout delay.
*
* @param timeout
* @throws InterruptedException
*/
void blockingPump(long timeout) throws InterruptedException;
}