Gossip protocol is a method for a group of nodes to discover and check the livelyness of a cluster. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol.

The original implementation was forked from https://code.google.com/p/java-gossip/. Several bug fixes and changes have already been added.

Usage

To gossip you need one or more seed nodes. Seed is just a list of places to initially connect to.

GossipSettings settings = new GossipSettings();
int seedNodes = 3;
ArrayList<GossipMember> startupMembers = new ArrayList<GossipMember>();
for (int i = 1; i < seedNodes+1; ++i) {
  startupMembers.add(new RemoteGossipMember("127.0.0." + i, 2000, i + ""));
}

Here we start five gossip processes and check that they discover each other. (Normally these are on different hosts but here we give each process a distinct local ip.

ArrayList<GossipService> clients = new ArrayList<GossipService>();
int clusterMembers = 5;
for (int i = 1; i < clusterMembers+1; ++i) {
  GossipService gossipService = new GossipService("127.0.0." + i, 2000, i + "", LogLevel.DEBUG, startupMembers, settings);
  clients.add(gossipService);
  gossipService.start();
}

Later we can check that the nodes discover each other

Thread.sleep(10000);
for (int i = 0; i < clusterMembers; ++i) {
  Assert.assertEquals(4, clients.get(i).get_gossipManager().getMemberList().size());
}