Internal decomposion

In general, internally Cluster4Spring remoting includes two layers:

• Remoting core - includes core remoting functionality which is agnostic to particular underlying protocol;
• Protocols layer - contains implementation code that is specific to support of particular remoting protocol.

While current version (0.85) of Cluster4Spring includes core logic and implementation for RMI remoting protocol, additional remoting protocols supported by Spring will be added later.

Extensions points

From the initial design phase of Cluster4Spring, the ability to extend and customize Cluster4Spring functionality was one of the main goals.

For example, most of methods are intentionally declared as protected ones (not private) to let the further extensions of Cluster4Spring features. In addition, Cluster4Spring internally uses quite a deep hierarchy of classes to provide good points of extensions.

Here is a brief list of possible extensions Cluster4Spring remoting functionality, if necessary:

1. Support of custom remoting protocols based on core functionality of Cluster4Spring remoting;
2. Custom policies for endpoints selection;
3. Custom implementations of endpoints (for example, for adding profiling or security related processing);
4. Integration with different implementations of distributed services registry (for example, based on JBoss cache);