I am going to be creating an application that will be highly distributed. There will be several "agents" each agent is a source of events, from external devices, ftp or filesystem. These agents will be deployed on seporate machines, close to the hardware source that will create the event. These agents will report back events to the central system for processing. One of the requirements is to be able to deploy new agents on the fly. These choices will be made by the user, because they will know what machines will be close to the hardware device, or will contain certain events. I will be writing this application in java, and have been looking at the glassfsh platform and what it can provide for me.
I'm looking at the clustering functionality of Glassfish, the Node Agents, and the heartbeet and startup functionality of the Node Agents.
My question is, can the clustering functionality support my requirements, I believe the original intent of the cluster is to load balance requests. My requirement is not quite the same, but it seems that Glassfish is really close to solving my requirements.
Does Glassfish offer the ability to expose what agents will have what applications, and allow me to configure the application running in a specific agent seporate from the application running on a different agent?
if anyone knows of any other platform that would allow me to deploy agents and manage them individually, along with supporting a heatbeet, and other management / high availability tasks I would love to hear of them.
Thanks
Joshua