blob: f51e25d93dd2bc99b61f9c2a6079930281e594f7 [file] [log] [blame]
<!--
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
-->
<HTML>
<BODY>
<P>Provides information about, access to, and common tools for GemFire
distributed systems. When a program wishes to access distributed dtaa
data stored in GemFire, it first creates a {@link
org.apache.geode.distributed.DistributedSystem} that will connect
to the distributed system. GemFire provides two means of discovering
the other members in a distributed group. The first uses IP multicast
to broadcast a message to all members that listen on a given <A
href="DistributedSystem.html#mcast-port"/>port</A> and <A
href="DistributedSystem.html#mcast-address">address</A>. The second
method of discovery uses special VMs called {@linkplain
org.apache.geode.distributed.Locator "locators"} to keep track of
the members of the distributed system. Each locator is identified by
a host/port pair that is <A
href="DistributedSystem.html#locators">specified</A> when connecting
to the distributed system.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>