[xmlblaster] Deliver to one of N subscribers?

[David Kerry <xml at navahonetworks.com>]

Hello,

I've seen this tossed around here before, but I haven't yet seen a
straightforward solution to this problem.

We have a need for a published message to be delivered to a group
of identical clients, with the exception that each message should
only be delivered to one client in the group at a time.

I suspect this would be a new plugin type to make this work properly
as the exsting ones don't quite seem to work at the level we need.

The goal here is to have multiple clients all logged in for load
sharing and/or failover purposes.  To make this work, the message
can only be delivered to one of the clients at a time (otherwise
we'll end up with duplicated work by all of the clients).

I have no simple way to pre-determine which client the message
should be delivered to since that depends on which clients are
connected at the time.

Also, if the message is unsuccessfully delivered to one client, it
should be possible to retry delivery to the next client, and so on,
and if it can't be delivered at all, wait until a client connects
that does satisfy the criteria and try again...

I guess you could call this a clustered client problem.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to make this work?

Thanks
-- 
David Kerry