Fundamentals of Software Architecture, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Pipeline Architecture Style

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One of the fundamental styles in software architecture is the pipeline architecture (also known as the pipes and filters architecture). As soon as developers and architects decided to split functionality into discrete parts, this style of architecture followed. Most developers know this architecture as this underlying principle behind Unix terminal shell languages, such as Bash and Zsh.

Developers in many functional programming languages will see parallels between language constructs and elements of this architecture. In fact, many tools that use the MapReduce programming model follow this basic topology. While the examples in this chapter show low-level implementations of the pipeline architecture style, it can also be used for higher-level business applications.

Topology

The topology of the pipeline architecture consists of two main component types, pipes and filters. Filters contain the ...