A middleware for transparent group communication of globally distributed actors

Abstract

Actors have been designed for loosely coupled concurrent systems based on asynchronous message passing. This model is of particular relevance for Internet-wide distribution, but cannot unfold its full potential due to the lack of a globally available messaging service for groups. We present a message-oriented publish/subscribe middleware that enables global group communication at near-IP performance. Based on this transparent group layer, we build libcppa, an Actor library with modular support for group semantics that is compliant to the new C++ standard.