Software Fortresses: Modeling Enterprise Architectures

Chapter 5. Synchronous Drawbridges

In a synchronous drawbridge, the donor fortress is blocked until the infogram has been received by the recipient fortress and the recipient fortress guard has sent a reply back to the donor. In fact, however, the donor fortress is probably not totally blocked. The donor fortress is most likely doing a lot of work for many different users. But at least the particular instance of the envoy process assigned to handle this particular infogram of the donor fortress is blocked, as are possibly some workers waiting on that particular envoy.