Marshalling

/ˈmɑrʃəlɪŋ/ noun

Definition

The process of gathering data from one or more applications or non-contiguous sources and putting it into a message buffer for transmission or storage.

Etymology

From Old French 'mareschal' meaning horse servant, later meaning to arrange in order. Military adopted it for organizing troops, and computing borrowed it in the 1970s for organizing data, especially in distributed systems and remote procedure calls.

Kelly Says

The term comes from marshalling troops - organizing scattered soldiers into formation for battle. In programming, you're gathering scattered pieces of data from different memory locations and organizing them into a neat package for sending over a network!

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