</h3><p>AppSwitch leverages the semantics of the BSD socket API to ensure that service references appear valid from the perspective of clients as corresponding services come up. When a client makes a blocking connect call to another service that has not yet come up, AppSwitch blocks the call for a certain time waiting for the target service to become live. Since it is known that the target service is a part of the application and is expected to come up shortly, making the client block rather than returning 