Pipe-and-Filter Pattern

CORE DEFINITION

The pipe-and-filter pattern is an architectural style in which a processing task is decomposed into a sequence of independent filters, each performing a single transformation on its input stream, connected by pipes that carry data from one stage to the next. Its core proposition is that separating concerns this way makes each stage independently testable, replaceable, and reusable, and lets a pipeline be recomposed by reordering or substituting stages. The key qualification is that filters should be stateless with respect to the stream, since shared or hidden state between stages breaks composability and makes the pipeline's behavior depend on execution order.