A Pure-Java Group Communication Framework
Carl Cook and Neville Churcher
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury
Abstract
This report presents the caise.messaging group communication framework---a simple Java-based API. The framework is intended to be used as the communication layer for distributed and/or collaborative systems that have communication requirements beyond simple point-to-point networking, but do not require the services or overheads of fully-featured groupware toolkits.
The caise.messaging framework allows groups of remote applications to communicate with each other in the most simple manner as possible. The result is an API that makes every participating application appear local to the calling application, providing communication within the application group by way of conventional method calls.
After providing a background on the current state of interprocess communication and groupware systems, this report presents the caise.messaging architecture, and provides details of the framework's implementation. Next, the caise.messaging API is presented by way of an illustrated simple example, providing a brief user guide. Finally, a discussion is presented of the use of caise.messaging in two large distributed systems.