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In SCA, a domain is a realm of control and administration. Specifically, a domain is a set of Fabric3 runtimes that act in that host applications and are are coordinated and managed together. A domain may be large, comprising multiple runtime instances on separate physical machines, or small, consisting of a single runtime. In a domain, policy and contributions may be shared.
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A distributed domain is composed of runtimes that perform several different roles: the controller, participant, and zone manager.
The controller manages the domain, including contributions in a repository and deployment to zones. A participant runtime hosts application components for the zone it is a member of. Each zone also has a dynamically elected zone manager which is responsible for coordinating with the domain controller for operations such as deployment. A Fabric3 domain is segmented such that the controller only communicates directly to zone managers, which in turn are responsible for managing individual participants.
Fabric3 uses JGroups ([http://www.jgroups.org|http://www.jgroups.org]) as its underlying communications technology, although this may be substituted by alternative technologies.
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