Infinispan HotRod C++ Client 6.0.0.Final

When the HotRod protocol was designed, one of the primary goals was to make it language neutral so that applications written in different languages could interact with the data placed inside an Infinispan Data Grid. The HotRod protocol is special because intelligent clients can offer superior performance by being aware of how data is stored in the grid. We offer three levels of client intelligence:

• L1: simple clients who connect to the grid using a list of statically provided server addresses in round-robin fashion
• L2: clients are aware of the topology of the grid and can be notified when new servers are added/removed from the grid
• L3: clients can use the grid topology and the key hashes to directly connect to the node who is the primary owner for a specific item of data, thus reducing the need for remote calls between the server nodes

Until recently, however, we only had three clients:

• The full-featured Java client (L1, L2, L3)
• The simple Python client (L1)
• A C# client developed during the Google Summer of Code by Sunimal Rathnayake (L1)

Today, however, we are proud to announce the 6.0.0.Final release of the HotRod C++ client with support for L1, L2 and L3. This client can be compiled for Linux, Unix and Windows.
I would like to thank SIA, and in particular Lorenzo Filì for all of the great work in getting us to this stage.

In order for the client to achieve feature-parity with the Java client, we still need to add OpenSSL and Remote Query support. We hope to deliver these features during the next development cycle.

So go ahead and download the bits and if you'd like to contribute, head over to our project on GitHub.

Infinispan 6.0.0.Final is out!

Dear Infinispan community,

We're pleased to announce the final release of Infinispan 6.0 "Infinium". As announced, this is the first Infinispan stable version to be released under the terms of Apache License v2.0.

This release brings some highly demanded features besides many stability enhancements and bug fixes:

• Support for remote query. It is now possible for the HotRod clients to query an Infinispan grid using a new expressive query DSL. This querying functionality is built on top of Apache Lucene and Google Protobuf and lays the foundation for storing information and querying an Infinispan server in a language neutral manner. The Java HotRod client has already been enhanced to support this, the soon-to-be announced C++ HotRod client will also contain this functionality (initially for write/read, then full blown querying).
• C++ HotRod client.  Allows C++ applications to read and write information from an Infinispan server. This is a fully fledged HotRod client that is topology (level 2) and consistent hash aware (level 3) and will be released in the following days. Some features (such as Remote Query and SSL support) will be developed during the next iteration so that it maintains feature parity with its Java counterpart.
• Better persistence integration. We’ve revisited the entire cache loader API and we’re quite pleased with the result: the new Persistence API brought by Infinispan 6.0 supports parallel iteration of the stored entries, reduces the overall serialization overhead and also is aligned with the JSR-107 specification, which makes implementations more portable.

• A more efficient FileCacheStore implementation. This file store is built with efficiency in mind: it outperforms the existing file store with up to 2 levels of magnitude. This comes at a cost though, as keys need to be kept  in memory. Thanks to Karsten Blees for contributing this!
• Support for heterogeneous clusters. Up to this release, every member of the cluster owns an equal share of the cluster’s data. This doesn’t work well if one machine is more powerful than the other cluster participants. This functionality allows specifying the amount of data, compared with the average, held by a particular machine.
• A new set of usage and performance statistics developed within the scope of the CloudTM project.
• JCache (JSR-107) implementation upgrade. First released in Infinispan 5.3.0, the standard caching support is now upgraded to version 1.0.0-PFD.

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

The user documentation for this release has been revamped and migrated to the new website - we think it looks much better and hope you’ll like it too!

This release has spread over a period of 5 months: a sustained effort from the core development team, QE team and our growing community - a BIG thanks to everybody involved! Please visit our downloads section to find the latest release. Also if you have any questions please check our forums, our mailing lists or ping us directly on IRC.

Cheers,

Adrian

Infinispan Arquillian Container 1.1.0.Alpha1 released

Dear Infinispan users,
a new version of Infinispan Arquillian Container has been released into JBoss Maven Repository as maven artifacts. The previous version was announced by http://blog.infinispan.org/2012/09/infinispan-arquillian-container-100cr1.html The blog post contains information related to setup of JBoss Maven Repository, including its address as well as address of the Infinispan Arquillian Container itself.

Maybe we should now call the project Infinispan Arquillian extension rather than Infinispan Arquillian Container because, since version 5.3, Infinispan Server has been based on JBoss Application Server 7 and the submodule called infinispan-arquillian-container could be removed.

As a result, the configuration of Arquillian with respect to Infinispan Server was simplified.

Developing tests with Infinispan Server

Now there's only one way to compose the arquillian.xml file:

The property ispnHome no longer exists. The path to the Infinispan Server is now specified via jbossHome. The serverConfig attribute then specifies the correct configuration file for the server.

In order to run tests with Infinispan Arquillian extension, one should use the following dependencies:
org.jboss.as:jboss-as-arquillian-container-managed:jar:7.2.0.Final:test
org.infinispan.arquillian.container:infinispan-arquillian-impl:jar:1.1.0.Alpha1:test

Now that we've configured the server to run in our tests, it's time to introduce a few enhancements which will help you write tests more effectively.

RemoteInfinispanServers

You can still inject the reference to a running Infinispan Server by annotating an instance variable of type RemoteInfinispanServer with @InfinispanResource.

When there are more Infinispan servers to be injected, you can now use the following snippet instead of injecting each server independently:

 
Then you can retrieve individual servers by calling .getServer(name) on the servers variable. The name must correspond to an existing container definition within arquillian.xml. The results of this call will be of type RemoteInfinispanServer.

WithRunningServer

So far users were forced to start the Infinispan Server either before the whole test suite (mode="suite") or before each class separately (mode="class"). The annotation WithRunningServer enables users to automatically start the server before a test method and stop it after the method. Example:

Note that in this case containers should be marked as mode="manual" in arquillian.xml file so that Infinispan Arquillian extension can handle lifecycle of these servers by itself.

When @WithRunningServer annotation is placed on a class, the server(s) will be started before the first method call in the test class, and stopped when JUnit @AfterClass event is triggered.

IPv6 support

Infinispan Arquillian extension can now work with Infinispan Server running on IPv6 as it can correctly connect to the server via JMX.

Testing embedded Infinispan

Running tests with plain Infinispan libraries instead of Infinispan Server has not changed since the last release. Read more about it in the previous blog post.

Thanks to Michal Linhard and Vitalii Chepeliuk who helped move the project one step further.

Cheers,
Martin