Pipes and Filters Pattern
The purpose of this repository is demonstrating a simplified version of the Pipes and Filters Pattern used in system integration.
For more info check out this complete list of enterprise integration patterns
Problem statement
The problem of performing complex processing on a message affects developers attempting to integrate systems. The impact of this problem is hard maintainability and flexibility.
A successful solution is to break down this process into a set of separate independent components (Filters) each performing its own task and connect them through channels (Pipes).
Diagram
The diagram shows the filters and pipes for our Online Chat application.
There are several message filtering requirements that must be met:
- Removal or censorship of messages with inappropriate language.
- Emoji insertion instead of certain strings sequences such as ;), :( etc.
- First letter of message should be capitalized
Short description
Pipes connect and send output messages from one filter to the next.
Each filter exposes a very simple interface:
- it receives messages on the inbound pipe,
- processes the message,
- and publishes the results to the outbound pipe.
Since all filters share the same interface they can be connected to different pipes. Therefore, the main benefit of this pattern is flexibility
because we can simply remove or add available filters
and compose different solutions.