Infinispan

Storing arrays in Infinispan 5.3 without wrapper objects!

2013-05-20T03:22:00.002-07:00

As we head towards the latter part of Infinispan 5.3 series, we're doing a series of blog posts where we provide more detailed information of some of the key features in this release.

As part of Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1, we added the ability to store data directly in Infinispan which previously would have required using a custom wrapper object, e.g. arrays. The way Infinispan supports storing these type of objects is by allowing a custom Equivalence function to be configured for keys and/or values.

This is a less cumbersome method that enables object requiring custom equals/hashCode implementations to be stored without incurring on a extra cost per cache entry. We've already been using this internally to store Hot Rod, REST and Memcached data where keys and/or values can be byte arrays, and we've seen some nice improvements in terms of memory consumption.

A nice side effect of being able to store byte arrays natively is that it makes sharing data between multiple endpoints less cumbersome since you're now dealing with byte arrays directly instead of having to wrap/unwrap the byte arrays. More on this topic very shortly.

Full details on how to implement and configure these new Equivalence functions can be found in the Infinispan community documentation. To give this a go, make sure you download the latest Infinispan 5.3 release.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan Server: remote protocols improvements

2013-05-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1 was released, which brought a slew of improvements to two of the remoting protocols: Hot Rod and REST. This week's 5.3.0.Beta2 brings even more goodies: the ability to expose the same container over multiple Hot Rod endpoints and the integration of the WebSocket endpoint. We've also been working on fleshing out the documentation for the server.

Hot Rod SSL

Hot Rod, Infinispan's own high-performance, topology aware protocol, has gained the ability to encrypt the communication using SSL and optionally require client certificate authentication. While this is still not the full-blown authentication/authorization infrastructure we will be implementing for Infinispan 6.0, it is the first step in that direction.
In the context of the Infinispan Server, setting this up is quite simple. Download the Infinispan Server distribution from http://www.jboss.org/infinispan/downloads and unzip it.
Next create a keystore with a self-signed certificate:

$ keytool -genkey -alias hotrod -keyalg RSA -keystore keystore.jks -keysize 2048
Enter keystore password: secret
Re-enter new password: secret
What is your first and last name?
[Unknown]: HotRod
What is the name of your organizational unit?
[Unknown]: Infinispan
What is the name of your organization?
[Unknown]: JBoss
What is the name of your City or Locality?
[Unknown]: Red Hat
What is the name of your State or Province?
[Unknown]: World
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
[Unknown]: WW
Is CN=HotRod, OU=Infinispan, O=JBoss, L=Red Hat, ST=World, C=WW correct?
[no]: yes

Enter key password for <hotrod>
(RETURN if same as keystore password):

Put the keystore in the standalone/configuration directory together with the standalone-hotrod-ssl.xml from the docs/examples/configs directory.
Now start the server using bin/standalone.sh -c standalone-hotrod-ssl.xml
This will start a server with a HotRod endpoint on port 11222 which will only accept SSL connections.

Now we need a client:

This client needs to find the keystore.jks file you generated above.

Hot Rod container sharing

Another feature added to the Hot Rod endpoint is the ability to share the same container between multiple endpoints, and exposing them on different interfaces. This could be used to offer an unencrypted backend endpoint to be used by "internal" servers to populate the cache and an encrypted frontend endpoint to be used by "external" applications. With the future addition of authorization, this will offer the ability to handle many types of security scenarios.

REST Extended Headers

The REST endpoint now returns the Expires header for mortal entries. It will also return additional headers when the extended query parameter is added, e.g. GET /cacheName/cacheKey?extended
will return the following custom headers:

Cluster-Primary-Owner: the node name of the primary owner for this key
Cluster-Node-Name: the JGroups node name of the server that has handled the request
Cluster-Physical-Address: the physical JGroups address of the server that has handled the request.

With the introduction of custom metadata, courtesy of ISPN-2281, we will also allow returning that information too.

REST Collections

Another improvement made to the REST endpoint is the ability to retrieve all keys in a cache, by simply invoking a GET /cacheName
This will return a list of keys present in the given cacheName as the body of the response. The format of the response can be controlled via the Accept header as follows:

application/xml - the list of keys will be returned in XML format.
application/json - the list of keys will be return in JSON format.
text/html - the list of keys will be returned in HTML format.
text/plain - the list of keys will be returned in plain text format, one key per line

If the cache identified by cacheName is distributed, only the keys owned by the node handling the request will be returned. To return all keys, append the "global" parameter to the query, as follows: GET /cacheName?global

WebSocket endpoint

The WebSocket endpoint is now finally part of the new Infinispan Server package. Bear in mind that this is just a pure WebSocket server. When we will be able to upgrade our base from AS 7.x to WildFly 8 we will be able to take advantage of the new Undertow web server which has native support for WebSockets.

Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta2 is out!

2013-05-17T11:39:00.001-07:00

The highlights of this release are:

interoperability between Hot Rod, Memcached, REST and embedded mode. E.g. it is now possible to write data through an REST interface and read it through Hot Rod or the other way around
the ability to expose the same container over multiple Hot Rod endpoints and the integration of the WebSocket endpoint

Please stay tuned for blogs detailing these features.

For a complete list of features included in this release refer to the release notes.

Visit our downloads section to find the latest release and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Mircea

Infinispan vs Hazelcast Performance

2013-05-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Sam Smoot has recently compared the performance of Infinispan versus Hazelcast both with default cache settings and posted some interesting performance results with Infinispan coming on top :)

@Sam, we hear you and we're working on reducing the number of JARs required for standalone, default use case :)

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1 is out!

2013-05-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Besides about 30 fixes and several enhancements, Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1 comes with the following features:

An preview of the functionality allowing an embedded client to read data written through HotRod and the other way around
SSL access to Hot Rod
All the keys in the cluster can now be retrieved over REST
better internal structures for holding data which should translate in lower memory usage, especially when using infinispan in client/server mode

Please stay tuned for blogs detailing all these features. For a complete list of features included in this release refer to the release notes.

Visit our downloads section to find the latest release and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Mircea

The first JUDCon Brazil experience :)

2013-05-03T03:31:00.002-07:00

The first ever JUDCon Brazil was held a couple of weeks back and it was a real blast! Firstly, it offered a great opportunity to meet some members of the JBoss community which have been helping us push JBoss projects forward in this region of the world, such as Hanneli Tavante, Roberto dos Santos Wagner, ...etc. It was great sharing ideas, experiences...etc with them and coming up with new ideas!

As mentioned before in the post before the conference, I had two new presentations to deliver, one on JSR-107 specification on JCache API and Infinispan's implementation, and the other on Hibernate Second Level Cache with Infinispan. The JCache presentation went really well and all the live coding worked as expected.

The second presentation was the busier of the two, with a full room packed with Hibernate/JPA users waiting to hear how to scale up their applications. I got excellent feedback from both presentations and looking forward to giving these presentations in more user groups or conferences.

The presentations are not up yet, but I expect them to be posted online in the next few weeks. In the mean time, here are a couple of temporary links to the PDFs of my presentations:

Bolttlenecks are out! Java Cache Standard (JSR-107) is in! (PDF)
Scaling up Hibernate/JPA applications with Infinispan second-level cache (PDF)

The big news of the conference was for sure the announcement of JBoss Application Servers' new name: WildFly. We're actively working with them to make the most out of Infinispan :)

Cheers,
Galder

Faster transaction protocols in Infinispan!

2013-04-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

The total order based protocol is a lock free commit protocol that relies on the concept of totally ordered delivery of messages which, informally, implies that each node which delivers a set of messages, delivers them in the same order.

This protocol comes with this advantages.

transactions can be committed in one phase, as they are delivered in the same order by the nodes that receive them.
it mitigates distributed deadlocks.

The weaknesses of this approach are the fact that its implementation relies on a single thread per node which receives the transaction and its modification from other nodes in the cluster, and the slightly higher number of messages exchanged by JGroups.

Thus, this protocol delivers best performance in scenarios of high contention, in which it can benefit from the single-phase commit and the thread that delivers/applies transactions is not the bottleneck.

Currently, the Total Order based protocol is available only in transactional caches for replicated and distributed modes and it is available in Infinispan 5.3.0 Alpha1.

If you are interested in know more, please take a look at the user documentation where it is explained in more detail how it behaves and how you can configure it. Since this is a recent work, if you find any incorrect behavior please create a JIRA.

Please find below some benchmarks comparing the total order based implementation with the locking based implementation in two different scenarios:

Contention: 1000 keys in a shared pool, 8 threads per node and 5 writes (on average) per transaction;

No Contention: 1000 keys in a thread private pool, 8 threads per node and 5 writes (on average) per transaction.

Give Java Caching Standard API a go using Infinispan 5.3.0.Alpha1!

2013-04-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

As part of the recent Infinispan 5.3.0.Alpha1, the first Infinispan JCache implementation was released which implements version 0.6 of the JCache specification as defined by JSR-107. It passes 100% the mandatory TCK including optional transactions TCK.

A document on how to use Infinispan JCache implementation has just been released, which explains the basics of using JCache, how it differs with existing APIs provided by the JDK, and how to cluster JCache based cache instances. More information will be added to the document, including quickstarts, as we make further progress in the Infinispan 5.3 series.

Please note that the CDI and annotations part of JCache 0.6 specification is still in flux, and we're not yet able to provide an implementation for it, but we expect the issues stopping the implementation to be resolved in the near future.

Finally, as it's expected from first releases, some bugs might be present, so if you encounter any misbehaviour, check the list of issues associated with the JCache component to see if the issue has already been resolved, or if not, please report it so that it can be fixed ASAP :).

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan coming to Brazil's JUDCon!!

2013-04-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

Infinispan team is coming to São Paulo (Brazil) to present on multiple topics around caching, data grids and NoSQL in Brazil's first ever JBoss Users & Developers Conference (JUDCon). The event is being held over two days, on 19th and 20th of April.

On the 19th, Manik Surtani and Pete Muir will present on how to supercharge web applications using JBoss Data Grid. Expect a very lively presentation from these very seasoned presenters :)

Another presentation where you'll be able to see Infinispan in action is in Shekhar Gulati's "Closed PaaS to Open PaaS : Migrate GAE Applications to OpenShift Using CapeDwarf" and Randall Hauch's "Elastic Consistent NoSQL Data Storage with ModeShape 3" talk, both on the 19th of April, where Shekhar and Randal will demonstrate JBoss projects using Infinispan heavily.

On 20th of April, I'll be speaking about scaling up Hibernate/JPA applications with Infinispan second-level cache. Even if the Infinispan caching provider was created almost 4 years ago, this is the first time I'm presenting about it. Really looking forward to that.

Finally, I'll also give the first ever presentation on Infinispan JCache (JSR-107) API implementation, which will be mostly a live coding session showing different bits about JCache API and the extra capabilities JCache users get from using Infinispan implementation.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan Server 5.3.0.Alpha1

2013-04-10T02:40:00.003-07:00

Hi all, as most of you know Infinispan has supported several protocols (HotRod, Memcached, REST, WebSocket) to expose caches to remote clients.

Traditionally these servers have been packaged in Infinispan's distribution with a simple shell script to demonstrate how they should be started (apart from the RESTful server which was packaged as a WAR file).

Since the release of Infinispan 5.3.0.Alpha1 we now have a proper distribution for these servers based around a stripped-down JBoss AS 7.2.0 server. What you get is robust support for all of the collateral services needed by the servers (JDBC Datasources, Transactions, Security, Logging, etc) and a solid platform for exposing your remote caches. Because the Infinispan Server only contains the essential services required by the server endpoints, it is not a full-fledged JEE application server, i.e. it cannot be used to deploy applications or host other services.

To get started with the Infinispan Server, grab yourself the distribution, unpack it and use the provided bin/standalone.sh or standalone.bat depending on your operating system.
The server should come up with HotRod, Memcached and REST endpoints.

The easiest to try out is the REST endpoint using the provided web-based console available on http://localhost:8080. Please also note that by default the REST server is protected using BASIC HTTP authentication. You should use the provided add-user.sh or add-user.bat scripts, depending on your platform, to add valid users as follows:

bin/add-user.sh

What type of user do you wish to add?
a) Management User (mgmt-users.properties)
b) Application User (application-users.properties)
(a): b

Enter the details of the new user to add.
Realm (ApplicationRealm) :
Username : user
Password :
Re-enter Password :
What roles do you want this user to belong to? (Please enter a comma separated list, or leave blank for none)[ ]: REST
About to add user 'user' for realm 'ApplicationRealm'
Is this correct yes/no? yes
Added user 'user' to file 'infinispan-server-5.3.0.Alpha1/standalone/configuration/application-users.properties'
Added user 'user' with roles REST to file 'infinispan-server-5.3.0.Alpha1/standalone/configuration/application-roles.properties'
Is this new user going to be used for one AS process to connect to another AS process?
e.g. for a slave host controller connecting to the master or for a Remoting connection for server to server EJB calls.
yes/no? no

Now open the console by clicking on the [+] in the bottom left corner of your browser window and the following form should appear:

Type the following commands:

PUT /rest/default/a a

Authenticate using the user/password combination you created above and the server should respond with a [200] Success message. In the above command, rest is the name of the endpoint (you can have multiple endpoints pointing to different cache managers or with different security levels), default is the name of the cache and a is the key. The second a is the value you want to associate with the key.
Now retrieve the value using the following command:

GET /rest/default/a

which should respond with a [200] a message. The console supports the various PUT, GET, DELETE, POST, HEAD methods as well as some basic HELP and is capable of recalling history using the up and down arrows.

During the course of the Infinispan 5.3.0 cycle we will be adding documentation and features, so stay tuned and if you have any feedback use the forum or our issue tracker.

Infinispan 5.3.0.Alpha1 is out!

2013-04-09T16:36:00.001-07:00

With a code name hard to match - Tactical Nuclear Penguin - and besides almost 50 bug fixes, this release contains several important features:

Total Order (TO) transaction protocol developed within the scope of the CloudTM project. The TO exhibits very good throughput in scenarios in which multiple transactions modify the same key set concurrently (high contention)
support for JSR-107 (Java Caching API) implementation, allowing Infinispan to be used as a cache provider
A new implementation of the Lucene Directory for Infinispan based on Lucene 4. Compatible now with all versions of Apache Lucene from 2.4 to 4.2.
A new packaging for the Infinispan server modules, based on the JBoss AS

Please stay tuned for blogs detailing all these features. For a complete list of features included in this release refer to the release notes.

Visit our downloads section to find the latest release and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Mircea

Infinispan @ Codemotion Rome

2013-03-21T09:29:00.001-07:00

Hi,

I you happen to be around at this year's Codemotion in Rome and want to know more about Infinispan, or simply want to discuss data-grid related use cases, come and attend my talk "Infinispan - the open source data grid platform".

Cheers,
Mircea

Infinispan 5.2.1.Final is out!

2013-02-08T10:05:00.004-08:00

This release fixes two critical memory-leaks:

ISPN-2803 - Memory leak on every cache write.operation
ISPN-2804 - Memory Leak: TransactionTable never cleans up complete transactions

A big thanks to Erik Salter for spotting and patching the above issues!

For a complete list of things included please refer to the release notes. Remember to visit our downloads section to find the latest release and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Mircea

Infinispan 5.2.0 Final has landed!

2013-01-31T11:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Infinispan community,

I am pleased to announce the much awaited final release of Infinispan 5.2.0. With more than 100 new features and enhancements and 150 bug fixes this the most stable Infinispan version to date.
Highlights:

The non-blocking state transfer which is a much more efficient and flexible implementation of the functionality that allows Infinispan to serve requests during nodes joining/leaving.
The cross-site replication functionality which allows backing up data between geographically distributed clusters in order to protect against catastrophic failures
Rolling upgrades of the hotrod clusters (zero downtime for upgrades)
A handful of fixes and improvements for the Map/Reduce framework

This release has spread over a period of 8 months, with a total of 4 Alpha, 6 Beta and 3 CR releases: a sustained effort from the core development team, QA team and our growing community - a BIG thanks to everybody involved!

Remember to visit our downloads section to find the latest release and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Mircea

Infinispan 5.2.0.CR3 gets rid of RHQ annotations

2013-01-25T07:34:00.003-08:00

The amount of feedback we've had on Infinispan 5.2.0.CR2 has been tremendous, and so we considered that Infinispan was not ready to go Final yet, so we decided to do another candidate release, called 5.2.0.CR3.

In this candidate release, we've got rid of the RHQ annotations dependency, so Infinispan Core has now one less dependency thanks to the integration of RHQ annotations with our own JMX annotations.

The areas containing the most important fixes are Distributed Caches and the Hot Rod server, so if you're a user of these features, we'd highly recommend that you give CR3 a go. Check the full release notes for detailed information on the issues fixed.

Remember to visit our downloads section to find the latest release, and if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan AS 7.x modules

2013-01-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

The latest Infinispan 5.2.0.CR2 release includes a set of modules for JBoss AS 7.x. By installing these modules, it is possible to deploy user applications without packaging the Infinispan JARs within the deployments (WARs, EARs, etc), thus minimizing their size. In order not to conflict with the Infinispan modules which are already present within an AS installation, the modules provided by the Infinispan distribution are located within their own slot identified by the major.minor versions (e.g. slot="5.2").
In order to tell the AS deployer that we want to use the Infinispan APIs within our application, we need to add explicit dependencies to the deployment's MANIFEST:
If you are using Maven to generate your artifacts, mark the Infinispan dependencies as provided and configure your artifact archiver to generate the appropriate MANIFEST.MF file:

Infinispan 5.2.0.CR2 is out!

2013-01-19T07:26:00.001-08:00

Dear Infinispan users,

This is hopefully the last CR release of the long expected infinispan 5.2 series. It contains some final touches and bug fixes, especially around the new non-blocking state transfer functionality but also a very useful enhancement to the HotRod protocol (and the Java client) which allows users to fetch the list of keys existing in the cluster - a big thanks to Ray Tsang for contributing this feature!
For the complete list of features please refer to the release notes.
You can download the distribution or the maven artifact. If you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC!

Cheers,
Mircea

Infinispan memory overhead

2013-01-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered how much Java heap memory is actually consumed when data is stored in Infinispan cache? Let's look at some numbers obtained through real measurement.

The strategy was the following:

1) Start Infinispan server in local mode (only one server instance, eviction disabled)
2) Keep calling full garbage collection (via JMX or directly via System.gc() when Infinispan is deployed as a library) until the difference in consumed memory by the running server gets under 100kB between two consecutive runs of GC
3) Load the cache with 100MB of data via respective client (or directly store in the cache when Infinispan is deployed as a library)
4) Keep calling the GC until the used memory is stabilised
5) Measure the difference between the final values of consumed memory after the first and second cycle of GC runs
6) Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 four times to get an average value (first iteration ignored)

The amount of consumed memory was obtained from a verbose GC log (related JVM options: -verbose:gc -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:/tmp/gc.log)

The test output looks like this: https://gist.github.com/4512589

The operating system (Ubuntu) as well as JVM (Oracle JDK 1.6) were 64-bit. Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta6. Keys were kept intentionally small (10 character Strings) with byte arrays as values. The target entry size is a sum of key size and value size.

Memory overhead of Infinispan accessed through clients

HotRod client

entry size -> overall memory

512B       -> 137144kB

1kB        -> 120184kB

10kB       -> 104145kB

1MB        -> 102424kB

So how much additional memory is consumed on top of each entry?

entry size/actual memory per entry -> overhead per entry

512B/686B                -> ~174B

1kB(1024B)/1202B         -> ~178B

10kB(10240B)/10414B      -> ~176B

1MB(1048576B)/1048821B   -> ~245B

MemCached client (text protocol, SpyMemcached client)

entry size -> overall memory

512B       -> 139197kB

1kB        -> 120517kB

10kB       -> 104226kB

1MB        -> N/A (SpyMemcached allows max. 20kB per entry)

entry size/actual memory per entry -> overhead per entry

512B/696B               -> ~184B

1kB(1024B)/1205B        -> ~181B

10kB(10240B)/10422B     -> ~182B

REST client (Content-Type: application/octet-stream)

entry size -> overall memory

512B       -> 143998kB

1kB        -> 122909kB

10kB       -> 104466kB

1MB        -> 102412kB

entry size/actual memory per entry -> overhead per entry

512B/720B               -> ~208B

1kB(1024B)/1229B        -> ~205B

10kB(10240B)/10446B     -> ~206B

1MB(1048576B)/1048698B  -> ~123B

The memory overhead for individual entries seems to be more or less constant
across different cache entry sizes.

Memory overhead of Infinispan deployed as a library

Infinispan was deployed to JBoss Application Server 7 using Arquillian.

entry size -> overall memory/overall with storeAsBinary

512B       -> 132736kB / 132733kB

1kB        -> 117568kB / 117568kB

10kB       -> 103953kB / 103950kB

1MB        -> 102414kB / 102415kB

There was almost no difference in overall consumed memory when enabling or disabling storeAsBinary.

entry size/actual memory per entry-> overhead per entry (w/o storeAsBinary)

512B/663B               -> ~151B

1kB(1024B)/1175B        -> ~151B

10kB(10240B)/10395B     -> ~155B

1MB(1048576B)/1048719B  -> ~143B

As you can see, the overhead per entry is constant across different entry sizes and is ~151 bytes.

Conclusion

The memory overhead is slightly more than 150 bytes per entry when storing data into the cache locally. When accessing the cache via remote clients, the memory overhead is a little bit higher and ranges from ~170 to ~250 bytes, depending on remote client type and cache entry size. If we ignored the statistics for 1MB entries, which could be affected by a small number of entries (100) stored in the cache, the range would have been even narrower.

Cheers,
Martin

Infinispan 5.2.0.CR1 is out!

2013-01-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

Hi Infinispan users,

I'm very glad to announce first CR from the 5.2 branch. This contains a handful of fixes and enhancements especially around non-blocking state transfer functionality (refer to the release note for complete lists).

Also here's an summary of the main features that are being developed in Infinispan 5.2:

The non-blocking state transfer functionality which is a much more efficient and flexible implementation of the functionality that allows Infinispan to serve requests during nodes joining/leaving
The cross-site replication functionality which allows backing up data between geographically distributed clusters in order to protect against catastrophic failures
Rolling upgrades of the hotrod clusters (zero downtime for upgrades)
Various fixes and improvements for the Map/Reduce framework

You can download the distribution or the maven artifact. If you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC!

Cheers,

Mircea

JSR 347 in 2013

2013-01-04T08:59:00.001-08:00

Happy new year, everyone.

One of my goals for 2013 is to push JSR 347 into action again. To kick start this, I propose a meeting among expert group members - anyone else with an interest in the JSR is welcome to attend as well.

Details are in my post to the mailing list. Please respond to the mail list if you are interested in participating.

Cheers
Manik

Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta6 is out!

2012-12-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

5.2.0.Beta6 brings a new batch of fixes around Non-Blocking State Transfer, Map/Reduce and command line interface.
But it's not only that, it also brings a bran new pice of functionality: support of concurrent updates for non-transactional caches(ISPN-2552) . Prior Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta6, there was a high chance for a deadlock to occur when two threads concurrently update the same key. This caused significant performance costs and throughput degradation, linear to the amount of contention. This functionality is enabled by default even though a compatibility mode is still available. You can read more about it here.

For a detailed list of all the issues fixed please refer the release notes.

You can download the distribution or the maven artifact. If you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC!

Cheers,
Mircea

Back from JUDCon China 2012

2012-12-10T02:58:00.000-08:00

JUDCon China was held for the first time last week in Beijing, and it was a blast!

I had never been to China before, let alone a conference there, so it was interesting to compare it with other conferences around the world. The use of simulaneous translators meant those giving presentations in English had to pace themselves a bit more so that translators would have time to catch up. There's was a good bunch of presentation given by native Chinese speakers too, so the audience got the chance to attend more interactive sessions too.

During this two-day developer conference, I was showing Infinispan's capabilities as a powerful cache bulding a transactional EE application that neeeded to scale up live. In this presentation, which combines Infinispan with JSF and CDI, I showed how to go from a basic temporary cached, to a clustered cache that used consistent hashing to distribute data, showing the ability to scale up and failover. This presentation which was given shortly after the keynote on the first day generated a lot of interest in the audience, with a lot of users wanting to find out how we compared with other existing cache and data grid providers. This was a great opportunitiy to introduce the rest of Inifnispan talks that were happening that day and the day after, where they could learn more Infinsipan's other features as a data grid: i.e. querying, geographic failover...etc.

My second presentation that same day was about querying Infinispan based data grids. The room was packed for this one, and in the presentation I talked about how Infinispan's map/reduce functions can take advantage of the paralellism available in cluster to resolve basic queries, and how Infinispan's contents can be indexed using the query module and queried via Hibernate Search or Apache Lucene APIs. Finally, I did a little overview of higher level APIs offering further querying possibilities (i.e. ModeShape, Hibernate OGM). As pointed out by Ales, the lead of CapeDwarf team, I somehow forgot to add his project, which offers the possibility of running Google App Engine on top of JBoss Application Server, which uses Infinispan and offers different querying possibilities too. Don't worry Ales, we'll sort it out for this presentation's next outing :)

For those who attended, the presentations should be uploaded to the JUDCon China website within the next few weeks.

Not all was presentations though, we also had the chance to socialise with attendees and other Red Hat employees in China. After all talks finished the first day, Jim Ma and Yong Yang did a fantastics demo of a cluster of JBoss Application Server 7 instances running on Rasperry PIs, and the audience had the opportunity to win one a Rasperry Pi too!

If you're thinking of going to China, you can't leave without trying a hot pot place! On Friday night we went to a Hai Dai Lao Hot Pot restaurant for food, and from a culinary perspective, it was the best food I had during my China stay. Hot Pot restaurants have this concept of cooking different meats, vegetables and noodles in two hot pots, one spicy and the other not. On top of that, you get the chance to mix up some cold sauces yourself (sesame oil, coriander, nuts, chillies,,,etc) and mix that with the cooked meat/veg. Unfortunately, one of our colleagues who had a nut allergy had to be rushed to hospital, but it was all Ok in the end :).

From here I'd like to thank Cindy Dong, Jervis Liu, Jim Ma, Christina Lin and many others that helped us, Aliens (according to Chinese Immigration prospects), feel like at home :). Can't wait to get back to China.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta5

2012-12-03T01:59:00.002-08:00

Hi Infinispan users,

5.2.0.Beta5 contains the usual batch of fixes especially around Non-Blocking state transfer functionality, Map Reduce and the CLI.

Functionality-wise, it is now possible to read/write data concurrently to the same remote cache both via a RemoteCacheManager and a RemoteCacheStore by enabling "rawValues" in the latter. This is the final item that was needed to enable us to implement Rolling Upgrades for remote caches. Because of this feature the HotRod protocol required a couple of extensions and therefore its version has been bumped to 1.2

For a detailed list of all the issues fixed please refer the release notes.

You can download the distribution or the maven artifact. If you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC!

Cheers,

Back from Devoxx

2012-11-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

This year - as always - Devoxx was a great conference! Not only the quality of the presentation (including quite some delivered by my fellows from Red Hat) but also the chance to meet and discuss with industry experts. And the Hackergarten was one of the this great networking places.
We had a long chat with Marius Bogoevici on a nice extension of the Ticket Monster Tutorial for Infinispan, so that users looking for an sample integration application would have a good starting point. Also Duncan Doyle contributed a nice demo of the cross-site replication functionality added in Infinispan 5.2 and Guillaume Scheibel implemented a Mongo DB cache store extension: awesome stuff!
All in all great conference and very good chance for us to get in touch with our community!
Cheers,
Mircea

Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta4 is out!

2012-11-19T04:15:00.000-08:00

5.2.0.Beta4 contains a handful of fixes around mainly around Map/Reduce and Non-Blocking state transfer functionality. For a detailed list of all the issues fixed please refer the release notes.

You can download the distribution or the maven artifact. If you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC!

Cheers,
Mircea