Infinispan 9.0.0.Beta1 "Ruppaner"

It took us quite a bit to get here, but we're finally ready to announce Infinispan 9.0.0.Beta1, which comes loaded with a ton of goodies.

• Performance improvements
• JGroups 4
• A new algorithm for non-transactional writes (aka the Triangle) which reduces the number of RPCs required when performing writes 
• A new faster internal marshaller which produced smaller payloads. 
• A new asynchronous interceptor core
• Off-Heap support
• Avoid the size of the data in the caches affecting your GC times
• CaffeineMap-based bounded data container
• Superior performance
• More reliable eviction
• Ickle, Infinispan's new query language
• A limited yet powerful subset of JPQL
• Supports full-text predicates
• The Server Admin console now supports both Standalone and Domain modes
• Pluggable marshallers for Kryo and ProtoStuff
• The LevelDB cache store has been replaced with the better-maintained and faster RocksDB 
• Spring Session support
• Upgraded Spring to 4.3.4.RELEASE

We will be blogging about the above in detail over the coming weeks, including benchmarks and tutorials.

The following improvements were also present in our previous Alpha releases:

• Graceful clustered shutdown / restart with persistent state
• Support for streaming values over Hot Rod, useful when you are dealing with very large entries
• Cloud and Containers
• Out-of-the box support for Kubernetes discovery
• Cache store improvements
• The JDBC cache store now use transactions and upserts. Also the internal connection pool is now based on HikariCP

Also, our documentation has received a big overhaul and we believe it is vastly superior than before.

There will be one more Beta including further performance improvements as well as additional features, so stay tuned.

Infinispan 9 is codenamed "Ruppaner" in honor of the Konstanz brewery, since many of the improvements of this release have been brewed on the shores of the Bodensee !

Prost!

Initial Support for Apache Avro and Gora

Avro and Gora are two Apache projects that belong to the Hadoop ecosystem. Avro is a data serialization framework that relies on JSON for defining data types and protocols, and serializes data in a compact binary format. Its primary use in Hadoop is to provide a serialization format for persistent data, and a wire format for communication between Hadoop nodes, and from client programs to the Hadoop services. Gora is an open-source software framework that provides an in-memory data model and persistence for big data. Gora supports persisting to column stores, key/value stores or databases, and analyzing the data with extensive Apache Hadoop MapReduce support.

As an effort to run Hadoop based applications atop Infinispan, the LEADS EU FP7 project has developed an Avro backend (infinispan-avro) and a Gora module (gora-infinispan). The former allows to store, retrieve and query Avro defined types via the HotRod protocol. The latter allows Gora-based applications to use Infinispan as a storage backend for their MapReduce jobs. In the current state of the implementation, the two modules make use of Infinispan 8.0.0.Final, Avro 1.7.6 and Gora 0.6

What’s in it for you Infinispan user

There are several use cases for which you can benefit from those modules.

• With Infinispan’s Avro support, you can decide to persist your data in Infinispan using Avro’s portable format instead of Infinispan’s own format (or Java serialization’s format). This might help you standardize upon a common format for your data at rest. 
• If you use Apache Gora to store/query some of your data in, or even out, of the Hadoop ecosystem, you can use Infinispan as the backend and benefit Infinispan’s features that you come to know like data distribution, partition handling, cross-site clustering. 
• The last use case is to run legacy Hadoop applications, using Infinispan as the primary storage. For instance, it is possible to run the Apache Nutch web crawler atop Infinispan. A recent paper at IEEE Cloud 2015 gives a detailed description of such an approach in a geo-distributed environment (a preprint is available here). 

Infinispan 6.0.2.Final includes ASL2-licensed JBoss Marshalling

We've just released Infinispan 6.0.2.Final to address a licensing issue we were having with JBoss Marshalling. Infinispan switched to ASL2 license when Infinispan 6.0.0 was released, but one of its dependencies, JBoss Marshalling, was still licensed under LGPL. JBoss Marshalling 1.4.4.Final, included in Infinispan 6.0.2.Final, has been licensed under ASL2.

The release can be found in the usual places.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan 5.1.3.CR1 out now!

The feedback keeps coming, particularly from AS7 users, so we've decided to do another point release in the 5.1 'Brahma' series. Apart from fixing several issues, including a critical L1 cache memory leak in active/passive set ups, this version enables the JBoss Marshaller class resolver to be configured via both the old and new programmatic configuration API. This enables Infinispan to provide a better solution for marshalling/unmarshalling classes in modular environments.

Full details of what has been fixed can be found here, and if you have feedback, please visit our forums. Finally, as always, you can download the release from here.

Cheers,
Galder

5.0.0.BETA2 released with better distribution!

A brand new Infinispan 5.0 "Pagoa" beta is out now, 5.0.0.BETA2 bringing even more goodies for Infinispan users:

• Initial implementation of virtual nodes for consistent hash algorithm based distribution is included. This means that each Infinispan node can now pick multiple nodes in the hash wheel reducing the standard deviation and so improving the distribution of data. The configuration is done via the numVirtualNodes attribute in hash element.
• The externalizer configuration has been revamped in order to make it more user-friendly! You only need the @SerializeWith annotation and an Externalizer implementation in its most basic form, but more advanced externalizer configuration is still available for particular use cases. The wiki on plugging externalizers has been rewritten to show these changes.
• lazyDeserialization XML element has been renamed to storeAsBinary in order to better represent its function. The previous programmatic configuration for this option has been deprecated to help ease migration but your XML will need changing.
• All references to JOPR, including the maven module name have been renamed to RHQ. So bear make sure you plug your RHQ server with infinispan-rhq-plugin.jar instead of infinispan-jopr-plugin.jar

There's some other minor API changes and fixes as show in the release notes. As always, please use the user forums to report back, grab the release here, enjoy and keep the feedback coming.

Cheers,

Galder