Active objects: a paradigm for communications and event driven systems

Current techniques for handling events, such as the “callback functions” approach, present some limitations to the development of network software, communication layered protocols, graphical interfaces for real-time applications and multimedia. These techniques lack the mechanisms for data flow structuring, for the interaction between different events and for finite state machine design. This paper presents a paradigm, based on the concept of active objects, that provides a new way of designing event driven applications. The concurrent and object-oriented capabilities of this approach make it particularly useful for facilitating the construction of complex event driven systems