A software bus is a
software architecture
Software architecture is the fundamental structure of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
...
model where a shared communication channel facilitates connections and communication between software modules. This makes software buses conceptually similar to the
bus
A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
term used in
computer hardware for interconnecting pathways.
In the early microcomputer era of the 1970s,
Digital Research
Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS ...
's operating system
CP/M was often described as a ''software bus''.
Lifeboat Associates
Lifeboat Associates was a New York City company that was one of the largest microcomputer software distributors in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lifeboat acted as an independent software broker marketing software to major hardware vendors such ...
, an early distributor of CP/M and later of
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...
software, had a whole product line named ''Software Bus''.
D-Bus
In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus")
is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...
is used in many modern
desktop environment
In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...
s to allow multiple processes to communicate with one another.
Examples
* Lifeboat Associates Software Bus-80 aka
SB-80, a version of
CP/M-80 for
8080/
Z80 8-bit computers
* Lifeboat Associates Software Bus-86 aka
SB-86
Lifeboat Associates was a New York City company that was one of the largest microcomputer software distributors in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lifeboat acted as an independent software broker marketing software to major hardware vendors such ...
, a version of
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...
for
x86 16-bit computers.
*
Component Object Model for in-process and interprocess communication.
*
D-Bus
In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus")
is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...
for interprocess communication.
*
Enterprise service bus
An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It represents a software architecture for distributed computing, and is a special varia ...
for distributed communication.
See also
*
Bus (computing)
In computer architecture, a bus (shortened form of the Latin ''omnibus'', and historically also called data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This ex ...
References
External links
* Microsoft MSDN
Microsoft on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Software architecture
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