Shared Resource Design Patterns
Summary Many applications are constructed of groups of cooperating threads of execution. Historically this has frequently been accomplished by creating a group of cooperating processes. Those processes would cooperate by sharing data. At first, only files were used to share data. File sharing presents some interesting problems. If one process is writing to the file while another process reads from the file you will frequently encounter data corruption because the reading process may attempt to read data before the writing process has completely written the information. The solution used for this was to create file locks, so that only one process at a time could open the file. Unix introduced the concept of a Pipe, which is effectively a queue of data. One process can write to a pipe while another reads from the pipe. The operating system treats data in a pipe as a series of bytes. It does not let the reading process access a particular byte of data until the writing process has co...