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Request-Response Pattern

The simplest coordination pattern has one party request and wait for a response; this synchronous exchange is easy to reason about but creates coupling between parties and limits throughput to one round-trip per interaction.

Tension Addressed

Simplicity vs. Performance; Reliability vs. Latency

Recognizable As

HTTP, RPC, function calls, query-result pairs, question-answer dialogues, blocking I/O

Canonical Sources

Fielding, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" (2000); Birrell & Nelson, "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls" (1984)

Transfers To

API design, microservices, database queries, user interfaces (form submission), any client-server interaction