POJO Mojo

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.1.02 of Terracotta Virtualization Server. This maintenance release for the 1.1 line includes a number of important bug fixes.

Terracotta will be at The Spring Experience, International Spring Framework Conference next week in Bal Harbour, Florida. Jonas Bonér (Senior Engineer at Terracotta and founder of the AspectWerkz AOP framework) will be speaking on how to transparently cluster Spring applications.

The big news is what we will be announcing next Wednesday - stay tuned. We will be announcing a partnership and a project that will change how Spring applications are deployed and managed in the enterprise. Check back here next Wednesday (12/7/05) for details!

Patrick Calahan from Terracotta will be speaking tonight at the Java SIG in Palo Alto:

http://sdforum.org/SDForum/Templates/CalendarEvent.aspx?CID=1796

The theme is using Terracotta DSO to cluster your POJOs transparently.

Today is the first day of the Spring Experience - the first ever user conference for users of the Spring framework. Terracotta is proud to participate in this conference - and to announce a partnership with Interface21 - the company behind the Spring framework. Terracotta and Interface21 will collaborate on the introduction of the first transparent clustering solution for Spring.

Ari will be speaking at the East Bay Java SIG tonight on "Injecting enterprise quality of services into applications transparently at runtime." Here is the abstact:

The modern enterprise development community has come to accept that many operational aspects of enterprise systems should not be explicitly handled by developer code. A decade ago, mundane tasks such as garbage collection and thread management were handled manually by developers; the code for these operational services mingled with developers' business logic and became an unending source of bugs. With recent advances in virtual machine technology, however, a general consensus has emerged that such responsibilities are best left to the underlying runtime environment.

We believe that a similar transformation is now underway with other operational services such as distributed caching. VM technologies have matured to the point where they can now take responsibility for state replication in much the same way they have already taken responsibility for memory management.

This presentation will describe how enterprise qualities of service can be provided as natural extensions of the Java Virtual Machine. We will show that by mapping natural Java language semantics into a distributed environment, business logic can be isolated from so-called "infrastructure logic" such as replication and caching.

Join us for a lively discussion!

What a busy few weeks this has been. We launched the new website. We had a Flash demo created so all of you can get a feel for what Terracotta is capable of in less than 5 minutes. We were at Web Services on Wall Street (a really good conference--this year at least). And we held a private seminar for folks interested in more technical detail on Terracotta.

And, most importantly, we launched version 1.5 of our software. 1.5 is pretty helpful:

1. Configuration of DSO roots, JDBC query caching, and server configs is much simpler
2. DSO has performance improvements that makes it faster than alternative clustering solutions for most use cases
3. DSO now supports JRE 1.5.
3. and JDBC now has row-level invalidation. Row-level is essentially the ability to cache result sets inside the JDBC driver, but when Oracle tells you "row XYZ changed in the database" to be able to compute which resultsets had that row as part of their contents. We are there for SQL on the wire. Row-level with stored procedure support is next.

All in all, I am very happy with the progress our team has made, both in process as well as quality. We now drop in most places we go in a couple of hours...I don't think we have taken more than 24 hours of calendar time for any use case folks have brought us.

I can't wait for 2.0!

If you do, then you should come to our JavaOne session about Transparently Clustered Spring -- A Runtime Solution for Java™ Technology and learn how to cluster your Spring application in minutes, with zero changes to application code.

The session (TS-3217) will be held on Tuesday, 05/16/2006, 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM and has the following abstract:

How do you scale a Spring application beyond a single node? How can you guarantee high-availability, eliminate single points of failure, and make sure that you meet your customer SLAs?

Historically speaking, clustering an application is not easy: it takes a significant amount of time and usually requires you to rewrite parts of your application. It also usually perturbs your domain model and breaks object identity.

But does it have to be like that?

In this talk, Jonas Bonér will walk you through how to cluster your Spring application, transparently and naturally, with no changes to your application code, using the Terracotta Spring Runtime.

The Terracotta Spring Runtime allows you to take an arbitrary Spring application, written for a single JVM™ machine, and cluster it to N nodes while preserving the exact same semantics.

For example:

• Life-cycle semantics and scope for Spring beans are preserved across the cluster - within the same logical ApplicationContext (singleton and session scoped beans).
• Spring's local event mechanism in the ApplicationContext is turned into high-performance asynchronous, distributed and reliable events (messages), but still local within the same logical ApplicationContext.
• Clustered beans can be exported using Spring JMX support, which guarantees a single point of management and coherent view of all the JMX data in the cluster.
• Spring WebFlow's web flows are transparently shared across the cluster.
• and more...

The session is backed up by several live demos.

If you do not have time to see the session (or saw it, but want to know more) you are welcome to stop by our booth and we will show you some demos and explain how things work and what you can get out of it.

See you there.

We're here at JavaOne right now. Lots of excitement on the floor today.

Stop by and say hi and check out our demos. We're to the left as you walk into the exhibition, near Adobe and BEA's booths.

Also, don't miss Jonas' talk today at 2 on Terracotta Spring.

Terracotta Sessions 2.0.3 and Terracotta DSO 2.0.3 have been released and are available for download. This release introduces a Linux version of Terracotta Sessions to address the need of HTTP session replication on Linux. Terracotta's core Distributed Shared Object (DSO) technology now supports clustering partial collections on the server for more optimized performance, and support has been added to cluster many of the java.util.concurrent classes new for Java 5.

Jonas's personal blog says it best: JonasBoner.com

Spring and Terracotta are co-hosting a webinar on September 12th. Rob Harrop of Interface21 fame has been gracious enough to help us explain to those who attend how Terracotta can help add value for Spring apps. Terracotta for Spring clusters applications that use the Spring framework with no ORMapper or JMS or other "Enterprise class" infrastructure in the way--except of course Terracotta itself.

If you are looking for a primer on the basics of Terracotta and Spring for clustering any or all the following:
1. Singleton beans in ApplicationContext
2. Session and Customer scoped beans under Spring 2.0
3. Events and simple messaging
4. Spring Webflow

A good place to start is this primer that Jonas Bonér, Chris Richardson, and Evgueni Kouleshov published on The Server Side.

Be sure to sign up to attend the webinar early and come with use cases and questions. Jonas and Rob will be there "in person" and will be prepared to go as detailed as anyone may need.

Terracotta 2.1 has been released and is available for download. This release introduces a new product called Terracotta for Spring (Release Candidate 1), made specifically for clustering web applications deployed on the Spring Framework. Terracotta for Spring includes support for clustering JMX, Web Flow, and singleton Spring Beans. Additionally, support for SUSE Linux 10 and Solaris 10 has been added to Terracotta Sessions and Terracotta DSO, and the release contains a number of performance enhancements such as new pre-fetching heuristics to predict which objects a node will access.

Yes, its true. Our software is now downloadable without your needing to register. If you want to run a Spring app that shares state w/o Hibernate. If you want to cluster session underneath a Struts, Spring Web Flow, or other conversational web application but cannot stand Java serialization. If you want access to massive datasets from thousands of servers. If you want these capabilities without RMI, JDBC, JGroups, filesystem sharing or custom clustering, then Terracotta can help.

Terracotta's software simplifies JAVA scalability and availability by clustering your application's heap. Try it out, experience it for yourself. And you can contact us if it works for you and you start thinking about moving to production.

I am very excited about being able to allow people to prove to themselves that it works without any hinderances. I am looking forward to all the questions and feedback out there.

If you need what we have, no need to wait anymore. Give it a shot.

Hung out at the Philly JUG last night:
http://duke.csc.villanova.edu/phillyjug/index.jsp

Those guys asked some great questions and really engaged on the topic of transparent clustering and stateful versus stateless application design. Interestingly enough, most of the 100 people in the room seemed to agree that stateless app design presents good operational characteristics. I can load balance using non-sticky (read: cheaper load balancing setup) and I can kill any app server at any time, unilaterally. Last, I can scale just by scaling my data store.

But, Serialization impacts, and OR-mapping can slow you down and that gets frustrating when you know the data you are storing really is only being saved BECAUSE you are stateless (truly transient data, but you want it around in case of server failure--like Spring Web Flow content or Struts' data insession).

Wouldn't you rather be "stateful" in your design too?

I can't wait till my new article on the topic gets posted up at DevX.

Thanks Philly!

This tutorial walks a developer through clustering a simple Swing application comprised of a slider. Take this step-by-step tutorial to find out how to use configuration-driven clustering technology, avoid custom APIs as well as Java Serialization, and set up Eclipse for doing clustered programming going forward.

I did it myself, from scratch, and it took 11 minutes. Give it a try.

We are doing a pretty kewl Webex on 10/25 where we show how to build the Master-Worker pattern using standard JDK1.5. Learn how to cluster it at runtime using DSO. There is also a real world app that implements a parallel web spider (much like Google might have done it in Java) using this approach. The neatest thing is all the source code to the implementation is available under BSD license for people to tweak and use as they see fit.

Attend the webinar and learn to operate / scale this reliable work-management system.

I will be in Reston, Virgina at the NOVA JUG this Tuesday, November 14th and at the New York JUG on November 15th. If you want to learn about the internals of Terracotta's products and about some customer case studies that, hopefully, illustrate the value of heap-level clustering for Java, please attend.

Please RSVP in order to attend the NovaJUG.

Please RSVP in order to attend the NYJavaSIG.

Can't wait to see you all there. I am really looking forward to it...

If you have been hoping to make it to a JUG session on Terracotta DSO, Google hosted one for their engineers. They recorded it and put it up on Google Video.

I loved the questions, the equipment for the presentation, and their facilities are downright amazing. I included a few notes in the extended entry.

Wow,

it has been a crazy week. I will try to pull together a list of links to folks who covered our open source announcement. Things have been absolutely insane though. So much so, that I won't be able to attend the Spring Experience this week. I was looking forward to meeting up with Rod, Rob, and Adrian in person. I was also hoping to attend some of the sessions on 2.0 updates, etc. Anyways, Terracotta will be there. If you are interested in speaking with us while at the conference you should seek out Jonas Bonér (he is presenting there) or Gary Nakamura. They will likely be in Terracotta t-shirts or button downs. I would LOVE it if anyone thinking about use cases for clustering Spring Beans would seek out Jonas and Gary and get your ideas over to us. With our going open source, you can also talk to them about becoming a committer, contributor, or getting more involved.

We welcome the community's input.

Read on for a non-exhaustive list of links about our announcement.

Terracotta Forge is planning to open its doors the first week of January, 2007. We have 4 projects in the works already, including:

• Glassbox
• Clustered Wicket
• Clustered Lucene RAM directories
• our own clustered CommonJ implementation

I am excited about the concept of having a single place for developers to go when looking to run their favorite frameworks in a clustered manner. Furthermore, people who have ideas for value-added services built on DSO will have a place to host and grow those projects, including direct access to the DSO engineers at Terracotta. Most importantly, Forge users will make solutions available to the community in a location people are coming to for clustering; you won't have to worry about how to generate traffic and awareness.

Please visit the site for info on the services the Terracotta Forge will provide for projects hosted there. Right now, we are just looking for project ideas. Please submit your projects using the instructions therein. Also, feel free to email me at [ari AT terracottatech DOT com] with your ideas (we are not heavy on process at the moment. Just looking for good ideas).

Also, feel free to download Open Terracotta and get started clustering your project while you are waiting for the hosting services to be constructed.

I recently cohosted a webinar with Filip Hanik who is PMC lead on Tomcat and Tribes for Apache. (You will need the Raindance player to view this.)

The gist is that Terracotta recently ran ourselves through JBoss's own benchmark for a customer and found that while JBoss was doing 10 - 100 ops per second (depending on the load script used), Terracotta was doing 2000 - 4000. It is worth looking at the webinar to learn about the use case, the customer's architecture under JBoss and their desired architecture goals. The webinar does go into detail on how Terracotta works and perhaps why the performance differences.

I am very excited to have helped this customer. The benchmark differences translated to the real-world use case. The customer now needs less application code (many tricks were being done to work around JBossCache's performance) and fewer servers in order to handle the same volume of web user traffic.

I am going to write an article shortly on how Terracotta is delivering such high transaction volumes. I expect to post it here by end of the week.

--Ari