JMSGroups : JMS compliant group communication

Nowadays, computers are the indispensable part of our life. They evolve rapidly and are more and more versatile. Computer networks made the remote corners of the world just a click away. But unavoidably, any software and hardware component is subject to failure. Distributed systems spread on tens or hundreds of machines are particularly vulnerable to failures. Consequently, high availability and fault tolerance became a "must have" feature for such systems. Software fault tolerance is achieved through the technique called replication. In replication several software replicas are executed at the same time. If one or several of them fail, other still provide the service. Software replication is often implemented using group communication, which provides communication primitives with various semantics and greatly simplifies the development of highly available and fault tolerant services. However, despite tremendous advances in research and numerous prototypes, group communication stays confined to small niches and academic prototypes. In contrast, other technology, called messageoriented middleware such as the Java Message Service (JMS) is widely used in distributed systems, and has become a de-facto standard. We believe that the lack of a well-defined and easily understandable standard is the reason that hinders the deployment of group communication systems. Since JMS is a well-established technology, we propose to extend JMS adding group communication primitives to it. Foremost, this requires to extend the traditional semantics of group communication in order to take into account various features of JMS, e.g., durable/non-durable subscriptions and persistent/non-persistent messages. The resulting new group communication specification, together with the corresponding API, defines group communication primitives compatible with JMS, that we call JMSGroups. To validate the specification and API we provide a prototype implementation of JMSGroups. As such, we believe it facilitates the acceptance of group communication by a larger community and provides a powerful environment for building fault-tolerant applications.