What is Ivy?

Ivy is a software bus designed at CENA (France). A software bus is a system that allows software applications to exchange information with the illusion of broadcasting that information, selection being performed by the receiving applications. Using a software bus is very similar to dealing with events in a graphical toolkit: on one side, messages are emitted without caring about who will handle them, and on the other side, one decide to handle the messages that have a certain type or follow a certain pattern. Software buses are mainly aimed at facilitating the rapid development of new agents, and at managing a dynamic collection of agents on the bus: agents show up, emit messages and receive some, then leave the bus without blocking the others.

Ivy is implemented as a collection of libaries for several languages and platforms. If you want to read more about the principles Ivy before reading this guide of the java library, please refer to The Ivy sofware bus: a white paper. If you want more details about the internals of Ivy, have a look at The Ivy architecture and protocol. And finally, if you are more interested in other languages, refer to other guides such as The Ivy C library guide or The Ivy Perl library guide. All those documents should be available from the Ivy Web site at http://www.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/.