README

The goal of Cohort is to provide a library for high-latency, low reliability network clustering communicating over HTTP.

High level design ideas:
 - p2p based with no master
 - Required operations: list members of a swarm (name?), add member, remove member
 - loose consistency on swarm membership, total membership = sum of lists of members from all members
 - event based async messaging api (possibly use https://github.com/sonatype/async-http-client under the covers)
    - use JAXB to marshall messages to XML
    - listen with servlet (3.0) 
    - optionally permanently queue messages and retry periodically
    
Membership join protocol
 - join request issued by new member
    - recieves successful response with list of known members
    - send join request to all other known members
        - using guaranteed delivery system just pretend acknowledged, 
          any attempted communication with them will fail anyway if initial failed