摘自: http://pocoproject.org/docs/00100-GuidedTour.html
Active object is an object that has methods executing in their own thread. This makes asynchronous member function calls possible — call a member function, while the function executes, do a bunch of other things, and, eventually, obtain the function's return value. The following example shows how this is done in POCO. The ActiveAdder class in defines an active method add() , implemented by the addImpl() member function. Invoking the active method in main() yields an Poco::ActiveResult (also known as a future), that eventually receives the function's return value.