4.1.0.FINAL is out - and announcing 4.2.0

Yes, things have been quiet on this blog as of late, but a lot has been going on.  Let's start with the big news.  After much work on feedback reported on the last Radegast release candidate, Infinispan 4.1.0.FINAL is finally ready.  Many thanks to the community who have worked tirelessly in testing stuff, reporting stuff.

This is a very important release.  If you are using 4.0.0 (Starobrno), I strongly recommend upgrading to Radegast as we have a whole host of big fixes, performance improvements and new features for you.  A full changelog is available on JIRA, but a few key features to note are server endpoints, a Java-based client for the Hot Rod protocol, and the new LIRS eviction algorithm.

Download it, give it a go, and talk about it on the forums.  Tell your friends about it, tweet about it.

The other interesting piece of news is the announcement of a 4.2.0 release.  We've decided to take a few key new features from 5.0.0 and release them earlier, as 4.2.0 - codenamed Ursus.  If you are interested in what's going to be in Ursus, have a look at this feature set, and expect a beta on Ursus pretty soon now!

Enjoy!
Manik

Radegast ever closer to a final release - CR3 is released.

As much as I expected 4.1.0.CR2 to be the last release candidate before a final release, we've decided to release another candidate for you to try out before pushing out a final release.  CR3 is now out and ready to roll.

There has been a lot of activity in the Infinispan community over the last 3 weeks, with lots of people putting CR2 through its paces, and reporting everything from the trivial through to the critical.  This is awesome stuff, folks - keep it up!

This release has fixed a whole bunch of things you guys have reported.  Many thanks to Galder, Mircea, Vladimir and Sanne, working hard around vacations to get this release out.

Detailed release note reports are on JIRA, and it can be downloaded in the usual place.  Use the forums and report stuff - push this as hard as you've been pushing CR2 and we will have that rock-solid final release we all want!

Enjoy!
Manik

Infinispan 4.1.0 "Radegast" 2nd release candidate just released!

I've just released Infinispan 4.1.0.CR2, codenamed Radegast.  Why is this release so important?  Because it is very close to the final version of the Hot Rod wire protocol, and the client and server modules that sit on either end of Hot Rod, allowing remote and non-JVM access to the data grid.  Further, the memached protocol - along with the ability to make use of any existing memcached client - is also supported.

Since the last release candidate, a number of important bugs - as reported by you, the community - have been addressed, all details available on this release note report.

Thanks go out to the community for contributions, lots of testing and feedback, and given that I hope this to be the last release candidate before a final release of 4.1.0, I'm counting on even more feedback, etc. for this release.  Keep 'em coming, people! :-)

The release is available on Sourceforge, please use the user forums for questions and JIRA to report issues.

Enjoy!
Manik

Infinispan 4.1.0.CR1 is now available!

After very busy last few weeks with JUDCon and JBoss World/Red Hat Summit, we're proud to release Infinispan 4.1.0.CR1, the first candidate release of the Infinispan 4.1 series. The release is downloadable in the usual place.

A lot of work has gone into this release primarily with the aim of stabilising new functionality wrote in previous beta/alpha versions. Here are some of the highlights included in this release:

• An fantastic demo showing how to run Infinispan in EC2. Check Noel O'Connor's blog last month for more detailed information.
• Enable Hot Rod servers to run behind a proxy in environments such as EC2, and make TCP buffers and TCP no delay flag configurable for both the server and client.
• Important performance improvements for Infinispan based Lucene directory and Hot Rod client and sever.
• To avoid confusion, the single jar distribution has been removed. The two remaining distributions are: The bin distribution containing the Infinispan modules and documentation, and the all distribution which adds demos on top of that.

A more detailed changelog can be found here.

Finally, if you're a user of Infinispan 4.0 or 4.1, please make sure you download and try this release out so that any outstanding issues are fixed in time for the final release. Also, if you're interested in finding out more about Infinispan's architecture, don't miss Manik's latest article explaining Infinispan's 'nuts and bolts'.

Cheers,

Galder Zamarreño

JBossWorld and JUDCon post-mortem

Wow, what a week.  We all know Infinispan is sexy and gets a lot of attention, but the last week has been unprecedented!

The first-ever JUDCon, the developer conference that took place the day before JBoss World and Red Hat Summit, was great and I look forward to future JUDCons around the world.  Pics from the first-ever JUDCon are now online, along with some video interviews with Jason Greene and Pete Muir.

Some of the great presentations at JUDCon include Galder Zamarreño's talk on Infinispan's Hot Rod protocol (slides here) and a talk I did with Mircea Markus on the cache benchmarking framework and benchmarking Infinispan (slides here).

JBoss World/Red Hat Summit was also very interesting.  There is clearly a lot of excitement around Infinispan, and we heard about interesting deployments and use cases, lots of ideas and thoughts for further improvement from customers, contributors and partners.

From JBoss World, there were three talks on Infinispan, including Storing Data on Cloud Infrastructure in a Scalable, Durable Manner which I presented along with Mircea Markus (slides), Why RESTful Design for the Cloud is Best by Galder Zamarreño (slides) and Using Infinispan for High Availability, Load Balancing, & Extreme Performance which I presented along with Galder Zamarreño (slides).

In addition to the slides, the first talk was even recorded so if you missed it, you can watch it below:



Further, Infinispan was showcased on Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens' keynote speech (about 28:15 into the video) where Brian talks about data grids and their importance, and I demonstrate Infinispan.



We even had an open roadmap and design session for Infinispan 5.0, which included not just core Infinispan engineers, but contributors, end-users and anyone who had any sort of interest.  I'll post again later with details of 5.0 and what our plans for it will be.

For those of you who couldn't make it to JUDCon and JBoss World, hope the slides and videos on this post will help give you an idea of what went on.

Cheers
Manik

JUDCon and the JBoss Community Awards

The first-ever JUDCon kicked off on Monday, and was very well received. It was good to see so many from the Infinispan community, and be able to discuss ideas and thoughts in detail.  I'm hoping to see even more Infinispan-related activity at future JUDCon events.

The JBoss Community Recognition Award winners were also announced at JUDCon, and I was really surprised to find that 4 of the 5 winners were Infinispan contributors.  Sanne Grinovero, Alex Kluge, Phil van Dyck and Amin Abbaspour - thanks for your participation in Infinispan, your peers have recognised your contributions and have voted with mouse clicks!  Congrats!

Given how many Infinispan engineers and contributors are at JBoss World this week, we are having an open Infinispan 5.0 planning and roadmap session.  So if you are around and would like to join in, this will be at 4:00pm on Thursday, in Campground 1.  For those of you not able to make it, discussions will continue via the usual channels of IRC and the developer mailing list.

Now to prepare for my next talk ... :-)

Cheers
Manik

Infinispan 4.1Beta2 released

Hi,

The second and hopefully last Beta for 4.1 has just been released. Thanks to excellent community feedback, several HotRod client/server issues were fixed. Besides this and other bug-fixes (check this for complete list), following new features were added:
- an key affinity service that generates keys to be distributed to specific nodes
- RemoteCacheStore that allow an Infinspan cluster to be used as an remote data store

Enjoy!
Mircea