Overview

A Grid Library provides a solution to the problem of managing versioned sets of resources that might be used by multiple Services. A Grid Library is a set of resources and properties necessary to run a Grid Service, along with configuration information that describes to the GridServer environment how those resources are to be used. For example, a Grid Library can contain JARs, native libraries, configuration files, environment variables, hooks, and other resources.

Grid Libraries are identified by name and version. All Grid Libraries must have a name and typically have a version. The version is used to detect conflicts between a required library and a library that has already been loaded; it also provides for automatic selection of the latest version of a library. A GridServer Service can specify that it is implemented by a particular Grid Library by specifying the gridLibrary and gridLibraryVersion Service Options or Service Type Registry Options.

Grid Libraries can specify that they depend on other Grid Libraries; like the Service Option, such dependencies can be specified by the name, and optionally the version. Also, nearly all aspects of a Grid Library can be specified to be valid only for a specific operating system. This means that the same Grid Library can specify distinct paths and properties for Windows and Linux, but only the appropriate set of package options is applied at run-time.