Reminder: JPPF topology

Before reviewing the details of each configuration property, it is useful to have the big picture of what we are configuring exactly. In a few words, a JPPF grid is made of clients (instances of your applications), servers and nodes. An application submits jobs to a server, and a server distributes the tasks in each job to its attached nodes. The simplest configuration you can have would be as illustrated in this picture:

We can see here that we have a single client communicating with one server, to which a single node is attached. In practice, there will be many nodes attached to the server, and many clients will be able to communicate with the server concurrently. It is also possible to link servers together, forming a peer-to-peer network of JPPF servers, allowing servers to delegate a part of their workload to other servers.

We could effectively build a much more complex JPPF network, such as the one in this picture:

The role of the configuration will be essentially to determine where each component can find the others, and how their interactions will be processed.