[jboss-cluster-dev] Infinispan in JBoss AS

[Brian Stansberry]

The topic of Infinispan integration into the AS has come up; seems like 
things are far enough along to start thinking about it.

Let's assume for now that AS 6.0.0 will be out at toward the end of Q2 
next year. Whether I mean Q2 calendar 2010 or Q2 Red Hat FY2011 is 
deliberately left vague. ;)  Anyway, that date is just my rough 
impression, could be earlier, could be later. My wisdom and experience 
tells me not much earlier. :)

I'll be very blunt and honest here. I love Infinispan; I want it in AS 
6, but for Paul and I getting it in needs to be a lower priority than 
continuing working the long-standing cluster management/deployment 
issues. Where getting Infinispan in sits relative to Paul and I working 
on other general AS 6 goals (faster startup, better embedded support) 
I'll let Jason comment.

The upshot of the above paragraph is I don't think it's right to count 
on a lot of cycles from Paul or I on this until probably after 
Christmas. And even then it needs to be maybe a 25-33% of our combined 
time thing.

OK, I'm done shucking and jiving. ;)

The big question is what to do about POJO Cache. Some options:

1) Infinispan comes up with the discussed JPA-style replacement. TBH, I 
think that's too big a task for the timeframes/resources involved.

2) We continue to use JBC/POJO Cache for FIELD granularity web session 
replication.

I hate to say it but I think #2 probably makes more sense.

The issue w/ #2 is how to manage both JBC and Infinispan instances. The 
AS has its own impl of the JBC CacheManager interface. It's actually a 
subinterface that exposes equivalent methods to CacheManager that return 
a POJO Cache.  The AS and EJB3 code uses this subinterface, so for those 
we have a lot of freedom to change things.  The Hibernate/JPA 
integrations w/ JBC and Infinispan use the JBC/Infinispan interfaces 
directly, and I don't want to change that in the AS. So, anyway, this is 
something we'd need to sort out, which doesn't seem like it would be 
that hard.

The other big area is adapting from buddy replication to DIST. I think 
the big task there is just going to be testing. Rewrite 
white-box/gray-box tests that assume BR etc.


-- 
Brian Stansberry
Lead, AS Clustering
JBoss by Red Hat