Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition.

The article focuses on messaging in distributed computing environments and the development of idempotent software applications. It states idempotence is essential for reliable systems and is a mathematical term that means operations will have the same effect every time it is performed. It mentions t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 55; no. 5; pp. 56 - 66
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery May2012
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:The article focuses on messaging in distributed computing environments and the development of idempotent software applications. It states idempotence is essential for reliable systems and is a mathematical term that means operations will have the same effect every time it is performed. It mentions that most applications include messaging with multiple partners utilizing semi-stable Internet standards which support the evolving environment but are unable to eliminate some anomalies. It comments on the effect TCP has had on data communication for use in communicating processes and uses HTTP Web requests as an example of an idempotent process.