Beginner's dilemma

[Bob M]

Hi

I know very little about hardware

I wish to run various java-based programs on several "Hosts"
i.e. say 3 programs per Host

I wish that each separate java program cam talk to all the others using say ActiveMQ message broker

Currently I have everything on a single laptop PC Windows based Pavilion DV7
but I need to change from one host to several

My problem is that I do not understand what exactly is a 'host'

Is is something like a Gigabyte BRIX, a Lenovo Tiny Think Centre, a Dell Precision T1500 or a Chromebox ??
Clearly I don't need to buy say 5 laptops or 5 desktops where keyboards and monitors are duplicated unnecessarily
I am completely lost - and happy to receive any advice

The programs I require on each host number about 4 or 5 - mostly java-based
weka - a data mining java program
Apache derby database
Netbeans IDE
my own java based program


Many thanks for you time

Bob M

[jas88]

I wish to run various java-based programs on several "Hosts"
i.e. say 3 programs per Host

I wish that each separate java program cam talk to all the others using say ActiveMQ message broker

Currently I have everything on a single laptop PC Windows based Pavilion DV7
but I need to change from one host to several

My problem is that I do not understand what exactly is a 'host'

Is is something like a Gigabyte BRIX, a Lenovo Tiny Think Centre, a Dell Precision T1500 or a Chromebox ??

In this context, a "host" is just a computer - any computer. It could be a Raspberry Pi, a Cray supercomputer or anything else you want. You don't need to run your IDE on all of them, either: just the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is enough, the IDE is only needed for editing your program, which can all be done on your laptop.

What do you need multiple hosts for? Is your laptop not powerful enough? Not enough RAM? CPU? Network bandwidth? Or is this some sort of class assignment to write a distributed application?

[Dinklegeta]

A host is just a machine doing something that you have requested it to do, something like a server would be the best example of a host as it can host files, folders and applications for the user to gain access to.