In my last post I took a look at data-centric and message-centric communication and their effects on software systems.  This post will take that discussion a little bit further by connecting the idea of data-centric messaging to Event Driven Architecture (EDA).  Along the way, we will build up a vocabulary that we can use to disucss systems of actors and the types of coupling we encounter while building them.

Typically the first program you write when you are learning a programming language is, "Hello World!".  Due to the popularity of my prior post on optimizing the traveling salesman problem with genetic algorithms I decided to write a general parallelized Genetic Algorithm Framework for LabVIEW, naturally the first thing I taught it to do was to say, "Hello World!".

Communication between Actors is meant to be done by traversing the Actor tree.  Assuming we decide not to pass message enqueuers around to all Actors in the tree, we will end up with a lot of message classes and a lot of message routing.  The extra messages and routing, however, buys us robustness as Actor E has no way of knowing if Actor C currently exists.  But what if we could bypass the tree for certain types of messages in a way that allowed us to decouple our actors from each other...