jGCS 0.5 review

jGCS library provides a generic interface for Group Communication

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: Nuno Carvalho

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jGCS library provides a generic interface for Group Communication. This interface can be used by applications that need primitives from simple IP Multicast group communication to virtual synchrony or atomic broadcast. Its a common interface to several existing toolkits that provide different APIs.

jGCS implements also a new concept of providing a group communication service. Using the notion of inversion of control pattern, this service provides the separation of configuration and use.

Provides also modularity, since applications use a common API that can be implemented using different solutions. The solution that will be used by an application is defined on configuration time.

This service supports the following notions:

Support for data and membership;
Support for peer groups and multicast groups;
Usable from IP Multicast to VSC. It can also be usable for autonomous membership services;
High concurrency/low latency/latency hiding: support for optimistic deliveries and semantic protocols;
Container-managed concurrency: it is up to the application decide the thread policy to receive messages (blocking or concurrent non-blocking).

Notes

Important: The current jGCS release is the first release (0.1). The API may not be stable. If you have any sugestions to improve the API, you are wellcome to contact us.

What's New in This Release:
The main changes made to the jGCS packages are mainly in the bindings, since the interface itself is stable.
The Appia binding now supports closed and open groups and can be configured to discover the addresses of group members from an external process and send messages to that group.
The Spread version runs with Spread 4.0.0 and contains some important bugfixes.
The jGCS implementation of Hedera also contains several bugfixes.