A chain of streaming elements is the composition of a single terminal streaming element with one or more filtered stream elements. The terminal streaming element is constructed first and then passed to a filtered stream constructor, which in turn can be passed to another filtered stream constructor. Each streaming element is responsible for a particular task and is independent of the task performed by other streaming elements. The filtered stream elements are not aware of the real type of the streaming element that is used internally. They are linked to it by a handle instance.