Click here to download the sample project files

You may download a 15-day trial version of the Announcer v1.0 component here, to test this project.

The Announcer component allows developers to cluster their applications with little code, providing a simple and reliable message passing infrastructure that serves as a skeleton to your distributed applications.

For this tutorial, we created a simple HTTP server, which handles only GET requests. This HTTP server waits for load balancer nodes to connect, and then mirrors the entire WWW root directory content to each node. Once the copy is finished, nodes are added to the list of available nodes, and serving of pages is initiated.

The distributed web server uses nodes in a round-robin fashion, so that the load of serving files is distributed among more than one computer. The load balancer master only accesses its hard disk when replicating the root, but is otherwise only receiving connections from browsers and handing the requests to the load balancer nodes.

The project demonstrates the usage of the Announcer to create an intelligent distributed application that requires no configuration, and little to no supervision. Just run the load balancer node application on another computer and you have a new node, instantly.

Download the project, and see how the Announcer can help you create a distributed application in no time.