Infinispan 7.1 Codename

It's that time of the development cycle when we get to decide the most important feature that will be part of our next release: the codename.

As usual, it must be chosen among a selection of fermented barley, hops, yeast and water aka beer.

A bit of history for reference:

4.0 Starobrno
4.1 Radegast
4.2 Ursus
5.0 Pagoa
5.1 Brahma
5.2 Delirium
5.3 Tactical Nuclear Penguin
6.0 Infinium
7.0 Guinness

You have until Friday, 5th December 2014 at 12:00 GMT to cast your vote
for your favourite, either in the form below or by going to the survey.

Infinispan 7.1.0 Alpha1 is out!

Dear Infinispan community,

We're proud to announce the first Alpha release of Infinispan 7.1.0.

This release adds the foundation for future features, optimization and many fixes.

Feel free to join us and shape the future releases on our forums, our mailing lists or our #infinispan IRC channel.

For a complete list of features and bug fixes included in this release please refer to the release notes. Visit our downloads section to find the latest release.

Thanks to everyone for their involvement and contribution!

Infinispan 7.0.2.Final released!

Dear community,

Infinispan 7.0.2.Final is now available!

This release removes duplication from the service lookup metadata. Please consult the release notes for details.

Thanks to everyone involved in this release! 

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

Infinispan 7.0.1.Final released!

Dear community,

Infinispan 7.0.1.Final is now available!

This is a bug-fix release and contains query performance improvements. For the complete list of changes please consult the release notes.

Thanks to everyone involved in this release! 

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

Why doesn't Map.size return the size of the entire cluster?

Many people may have been surprised the first time they used Map.size method on a distributed Infinispan cluster.  As was later deduced only the local node size is returned.

Infinispan had taken this approach to limit the chance that instead of getting the full cluster size you would receive an OutOfMemoryError.  This seems fair to return the local answer only but you secretly always wanted the entire cluster size.

For the Infinispan 7.0.0.Final release forget what you know when using the Map interface with Infinispan.

Enter Distributed Entry Iterator

We already announced this feature a while back at http://blog.infinispan.org/2014/05/iterate-all-entries-in-cache.html.  You can check it out for more details but it is essentially a memory efficient way of retrieving all the entries in the cache by iterating over them.

This has opened the way to implementing the various bulk methods on the Map interface that we could never do efficiently in the past (ie. Map.size, Map.keySet, Map.entrySet & Map.values).

Map size

Okay I admit, size could have been done more efficiently before, but the answer would have contained a very high margin of error.  Now size will give you a size value with consistency semantics just slightly less than ConcurrentHashMap does, but for the entire cluster.  Warning should be given that size may be slower for larger clusters or ones with a lot of data in a stored cache loader.

The size method behavior can be controlled by using a supplied Flag such as SKIP_CACHE_LOAD to not count any configured cache loaders or CACHE_MODE_LOCAL if you want the local count only.  These flags are not exclusive and can be both passed if desired as well.

Map Collection Views

In the past the Map.values, Map.keySet & Map.entrySet methods were only ever in memory copies of the local data at the time they were invoked, similar to Map.size.

Now these collection views will be cluster wide and an additionally will show updated contents when the cache is updated and your writes to the collection will be reflected in the Cache itself!  The only operations you can't do on these collections are adding values to either the keySet or values collections as they aren't key/value pairs.

If your cache was configured with a Flag such as SKIP_CACHE_LOAD or CACHE_MODE_LOCAL it will also be reflected in the collection view for both reads and writes.

Some caution is advised when using toArray, retainAll, or size methods as they will require full iteration to complete.

KeySet Optimization

The key set collection also has an optimization so it will never pull down the values so it has a lower network and serialization/deserialization overhead (unlike entrySet and values).

Transactionality

All of the aforementioned methods still support transactions in a way that you would expect.  There is one guarantee we don't provide and that is when using REPEATABLE_READ isolation.  We will not store entries read from an iterator in the transactional context as this could very easily run your local node out of memory with a large enough data set.

For reference methods that use an iterator internally are toArray, retainAll, isEmpty & size on the various collections as well as contains and containsAll on the values collection.

Other API Changes

These changes have also loosened some restrictions on other methods as well.

Map.isEmpty

This method before was only used locally as it used to calculate the size to determine if it was empty.  This method will now use the entry iterator and returns as soon as it finds that even a single value exists.  This is an important change as the old implementation would have to query any configured Cache Loader's complete size before returning.

Map.containsValue

We never supported this method before (not even locally).  This method will now use the iterator though and if it finds the value at any point point will return immediately so it doesn't have to iterate over the entire contents unless they don't exist.  However if you really want to do this operation often you should really use Indexing to make this faster.

Code Examples

I could put an example here, but I think some could take it as insult.  You have already seen 100's of examples as to how to use the Map interface and now in Infinispan you can use those in the exact same way and they will work just how you would expect them to.

Infinispan 7.0.0.Final is out!!

Hi all,

We are really proud to announce the release of Infinispan 7.0.0.Final!!

This is the culmination of several months of development which has focused on on Security, Cluster Partition handling, JSR-107 JCache 1.0.0 support, Clustered Listeners, Remote Events, Query improvements and brand new XML configuration.

To mark the occasion, the team has prepared a thorough release notes page highlighting all the major features and enhancements implemented in Infinispan 7.0 series.

The Infinispan team would like to recognise all the community members that have contributed to this release, in no particular order:

• Radim Vansa for his Soft-Index File Store and many more enhancements and fixes
• Takayoshi Kimura for fixes such as ISPN-3752, ISPN-4476 and ISPN-4477
• Jiri Holusa for his tremendous work to improve our test coverage work and fixing issues like ISPN-3442 
• Karl von Randow for his documentation fixes, init.d fixes in ISPN-4141 and enhancements to putForExternalRead method as part of ISPN-3792
• Jakub Markos for his work to optimise the Infinispan Server testsuite in ISPN-4317 and many fixes and test suite enhancements
• Michal Linhard fox his ISPN-3750 fix
• Vitalii Chepeliuk for his work on extending test coverage and fixes such as ISPN-3880
• Wolf Dieter-Fink for fixes such as ISPN-3916 and ISPN-3912
• Vojtech Juranek for his continued work to improve Infinispan with fixes such as ISPN-4072 and his work to increase the test coverage
• Martin Gencur for the many issues he fixed including ISPN-3771, ISPN-4499 and others...
• Norman Maurer for porting Infinispan Servers to use Netty 4
• Alan Field for fixes such as ISPN-4645 and ISPN-4376
• Tomáš Sýkora for fixes such as ISPN-3136 and ISPN-4076, and improved test coverage
• Paul Ferraro for many fixes including fixes such as ISPN-4375 and ISPN-4374
• Nicolas Filotto for his ISPN-3689 fix
• Rajesh Jangam for his ISPN-3877 and ISPN-3894 fixes
• Brett Meyer for his amazing work to get Infinispan working in OSGI environments as part of ISPN-800 and many related fixes
• Radoslav Husar for his several fixes
• Sebastian Łaskawiec for his work to improve our CDI integration and moving to Jackson for JSON
• Karsten Blees for his LIRS eviction fixes
• Niels Bertramn for his ISPN-4679 fix
• Duncan Doyle for his work on ISPN-4637
• Emmanuel Bernard for his documentation improvements
• Gabriel Francisco for his work to revamp the Mongo DB cache store
• Bilgin Ibryam for his OSGI fixes
• Erik Salter for his work on orphaned transactions and fixes such as ISPN-4872

Thanks to all contributors for your amazing work and effort! We hope you carry on contributing in future releases.

Finally, during the Infinispan 7.0 series, Gustavo Fernandes has joined the team making outstanding contributions in our Query project, and Tristan Tarrant has joined the team full time taking on Infinispan's Security layer. Thanks to both!!

Cheers,

Galder