JavaGroups – Group Communication Patterns in Java

JavaGroups is a group communication toolkit written in Java providing reliable multicast communication Its rst version uses the group communication protocols provided by the Ensemble Hay distributed communication toolkit but future versions will have their own builtin group communication protocols Group communication allows communication endpoints to form a group Messages sent to a group are received by all members of that group New members may join a group and subsequently receive all messages sent to the group and cur rent members may leave a group at any time Members that have crashed will eventually be removed from a group Communication endpoints can be processes or objects essentially any entity that can send and receive messages to from a group At the core of JavaGroups is a lowlevel abstraction of a communication endpoint of a group a channel When a channel is created it is given a name Multiple channels with the same name form a group A new channel automatically join