Software architecture for unified management of event notification and stream I/O and its use for recording and analysis of user events

Abstract

Event notification and stream input/output have always been regarded as two separate paradigms. There are, however, applications-especially in the realm of user interfaces and experiments-that could benefit from being able to receive or deliver data in either form. We present a unified approach to data transfer that facilitates conversion between the two concepts, as well as a flexible technique for implementing arbitrary event notification in an object-oriented way. A unified input/output library that simplifies error handling and ensures correct opening and closing of streams rounds up the proposed extensions to an operating system.