Introduction

1 Intended audience

This manual is intended for developers, software engineers and architects who wish to discover, learn or deepen their knowledge of JPPF and how it works. The intent is also to provide enough knowledge to not only write your own applications using JPPF, but also extend it by creating add-ons and connectors to other frameworks.

2 Prerequisites

JPPF works on any system that supports Java. There is no operating system requirement, it can be installed on all flavors of Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and other systems such as zOS or other mainframe systems.

JPPF requires the following installed on your machine:

• Java Standard Edition version 7 or later, with the environment variable JAVA_HOME pointing to your Java installation root folder
• Apache Ant, version 1.7.0 or later, with the environment variable ANT_HOME pointing to the Ant installation root folder
• Entries in the default system PATH for JAVA_HOME/bin and ANT_HOME/bin

3 Where to download

All JPPF software can be downloaded from the JPPF downloads page.

We have tried to give each module a name that makes sense. The format is JPPF-x.y.z-<module-name>.zip, where:

• x is the major version number
• y is the minor version number
• z is the patch release number - it will not appear if no patch has been released (i.e. if it is equal to 0)
• <module-name> is the name given to the module

4 Installation

Each JPPF download is in zip format. To install it, simply unzip it on a directory of your choice.

When unzipped, the content will be under a directory called JPPF-x.y.z-<module-name>

5 Running the standalone modules

The JPPF distribution includes a number of standalone modules or components, which can be deployed and run independantly from any other on separate machines, and/or from a separate location on each machine

These modules are the following:

• application template: this is the application template to use as starting point for a new JPPF application, file JPPF-x.y.z-application-template.zip
• driver: this is the server component, file JPPF-x.y.z-driver.zip
• node: this is the node component, file JPPF-x.y.z-node.zip
• administration console: this is the management and monitoring user interface, file JPPF-x.y.z.admin-ui.zip

These modules can be run from either a shell script or an Ant script. The Ant script is always called "build.xml" and it always has a default target called "run". To run any of these modules, simply type "ant" or "ant run" in a command prompt or shell console. The provided shell scripts are named start<Component>.<ext> where Component is the JPPF component to run (e.g. “Node”, “Driver”, “Console”) and ext is the file extension, “bat” for Windows systems, or “sh” for Linux/Unix-like systems.