Discussion: What skeleton does

The skeleton application is a distributed, always-available, self-replicating message service, albeit the same message every time.

It has two levels of access: admin level allows someone to set redundancy levels and perform other such tasks; consumer level only allows access to the message. Each kind of access has two interfaces: command level access, used by the launcher above, and programmatic access, in case we want to administrate it or get its message within another Jtrix application.

It is distributed in the sense that when it starts it spreads itself out over several nodes within the hosting service. If you are running it on your own one-node hosting service, however, you will see exceptions thrown on jnode's I/O as it fails to find an adequate number of nodes. Even if you have the full four nodes it requires you will see lots of debugging output as the skeleton application has debugging switched on by default.

It is always available in the sense that connecting to it will connect to any of the nodes on which it currently runs.

If one of these nodes dies then it will replicate itself to another node in the same hosting service.

Skeleton is built on the Beatrix application framework, and most of the functionality above is provided automatically by Beatrix, including the self-replication and the admin features.