This month’s installment of “Do It Yourself” switches gears a bit. Rather than focus on an application, this month’s column looks at a development library called the Spread Toolkit, a powerful network communication system. Spread isn’t a new project. It’s existed in one form or another for roughly five years. Strangely, during all that time, it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
This month’s installment of “Do It Yourself” switches gears a bit. Rather than focus on an application, this month’s column looks at a development library called the Spread Toolkit, a powerful network communication system. Spread isn’t a new project. It’s existed in one form or another for roughly five years. Strangely, during all that time, it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
Developed at the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems at Johns Hopkins University and partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the same folks who brought us the Internet) and the National Security Agency (NSA, the same folks who brought us Security Enhanced Linux: http://www.linux-mag.com/2001-09/se_linux_01.html), Spread consists of a code library and a server process designed to solve a number of the problems that arise naturally when attempting to build network-based, reliable, and high-performance applications. By using the Spread library appropriate for your project (there are interfaces in C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby), your code can efficiently and reliably communicate with one or more peers on the network.
Break it down
The project’s Web site describes Spread this way:
Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that’s resilient to faults across external or internal networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications and provides highly tuned application-level multicast and group communication support. Spread services range from reliable message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees, even in case…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
