Another alpha for Infinispan

Yes, Infinispan 4.0.0.ALPHA4 is ready for a sound thrashing.

What's new? Galder Zamarreño's recent contribution of ripping out the marshalling framework Infinispan "inherited" from JBoss Cache and replacing it with JBoss Marshalling has made the marshalling code much leaner, more modular and more testable, and comes with a nifty performance boost too. What's also interesting is that he has overcome issues with object stream caching (see my blog on the subject) by using JBoss Marshalling streams which can be reset. This too provides a very handy performance boost for short lived streams. (See ISPN-42, ISPN-84)

Mircea Markus has put together a bunch of migration scripts to migrate your JBoss Cache 3.x configuration to Infinispan. More migration scripts are on their way. (See ISPN-53, ISPN-54)

Vladimir Blagojevic has contributed the new lock() API - which allows for explicit, eager cluster-wide locks. (See ISPN-48)

Heiko Rupp has contributed the early days of a JOPR plugin, allowing Infinispan instances to be managed by JBoss AS 5.1.0's embedded console as well as other environments. Read his guide to managing Infinispan with JOPR for more details.

And I've implemented some enhancements to the Future API. Now, rather than returning Futures, the xxxAsync() methods return a NotifyingFuture. NotifyingFuture extends Future, adding the ability to register a notifier such that the caller can be notified when the Future completes. Note that Future completion could mean any of successful completion, exception or cancellation, so the listener should check the state of the Future using get() on notification. For example:

NotifyingFuture<Void> f = cache.clearAsync().attachListener(new FutureListener<Void>() {
 public void futureDone(Future<Void> f) {
   if (f.get() && !f.isCancelled()) {
     System.out.println("clear operation succeeded");
   }
 }
});

The full change log for this release is available on JIRA. Download this release, and provide feedback on the Infinispan user forums.

Onward to Beta1!

Enjoy,
Manik