Group communication in Erlang

[Johan Montelius]

Group communication is tricky to handle in the face of failing nodes. The  
modules in the Erlang standard library do not help much. The pg module  
does not handle the case where the leader of the group dies and in the  
worst case only part of the group will receive a multicast message. The  
module pg2 is not much better since it leaves it up to the user to  
implement the communication layer.

I've implemented a module, called view, that provides (hopefully) an  
improvement. The service provides uniform atomic multicast and also some  
other communication primitives. It will not survive a network failure so  
it should not be used if you think that the monitor functionality will  
deliver "noconnection" messages that are not truly failures.

If you're interested there is more information on:

http://web.it.kth.se/~johanmon/view.html

Happy to receive comments.

   Johan



-- 
Dr Johan Montelius
Royal Institute of Technology - KTH
School of Information and Communication Technology - ICT