Working in Distributed Architecture

This sections covers development peculiarities related to distributed architecture. Here's the list of basic considerations that should be in mind when designing a module compatible with distributed architecture:

  • Each context has three paths: a local path, a peer path and a remote path. Their differences are described below.
  • Every time you're getting context path as a string you should carefully choose between using getPath() and getRemotePath() methods depending how the string path will be used. In most cases getPath() will be the proper choice, but not in every case.
  • There's a difference between get() methods of Context and ContextManager. The latter accepts a local path, while the former accepts remote path and, thus, those methods return different result.
  • If you're developing server-side code and acquiring a Context, it can result to getting a proxy context matching a remote peer of a distributed installation. Thus, even the simplest method calls may be significantly delayed or even fail due to network issues.

Contexts in Distributed Architecture

Context interface has a number of methods related to functioning in a distributed installation. The below list describes some of those methods:

  • isDistributed() method defines whether a class instance implementing Context interface is actually a proxy context that has a remote distributed architecture peer.
  • getPath() method always returns context's path in a local context tree.
  • getPeerPath() returns context's path on the server immediately connected to current server (current server's peer). It's very rarely necessary to use this method in your custom code.
  • getRemotePath() returns path of the context on the server where it's actually defined. It's output differs from getPeerPath() output only in case of three and more tiers of distributed architecture servers. In a non-distributed architecture both methods' output equals to getPath().
  • getRemoteRoot() and getPeerRoot() methods return information about local root context paths of context sub-trees connected via distributed architecture. While javadocs provide more details, calling those methods directly is normally not necessary.

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