[jboss-cluster-dev] [Fwd: Re: Infinispan in JBoss AS]

[Brian Stansberry]

The list bounced Jason's post so I'm forwarding it to the list until he 
can join.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Infinispan in JBoss AS
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:01:19 -0500
From: Jason T. Greene <jason.greene at redhat.com>
To: Brian Stansberry <brian.stansberry at redhat.com>
CC: cluster-dev <jboss-cluster-dev at lists.jboss.org>
References: <4A560E20.4080404 at redhat.com>

A major initiative for AS6 is getting cluster management capabilities
into the core AS (instead of relying on a disparate JON group feature).
This involves a lot of rethinking of how we do metadata processing and
management of that metadata (in particular having management updates
apply to all nodes). This is a large effort, and will definitely suck up
Brian and Paul's time (in addition to the boot-time and other issues).
As much as I would love to see infinispan take over, I don't think it
would be a good idea to run both JBC and infinispan as it would make
integration  more complex, and IMO lead to user confusion and support
problems. I would much rather see us drop FIELD if Infinispan could not
handle that use-case.

So, IMO we need to either wait for the JPA/delta framework, or drop
FIELD. In any case I think the starting point is to satisfy the
hibernate guys with a good second level cache impl. That will definitely
get community usage faster than AS6 integration will.

Brian Stansberry wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 


-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss, a division of Red Hat

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