[infinispan-dev] Functionality based on configuration

Hi, when thinking about strong/eventual consistency and ease of configuration, I was considering whether cache configuration should affect results of operations at all (one example could be read committed/repeatable read, or write skew check). It would seem to me that the configuration would be simpler, and user options more rich if those options that change the result of operation would be purely API-wise (based on flags or method arguments) and the configuration could only change the performance (defining cache store will slow down some operations) or availability of these operations (you cannot start a transaction when the manager is not defined), not the outcome. E.g. is there really a point to be able to change sync/async configuration of the cache when the code expects strong consistency? If it can handle that, it should grab cache.withFlags(FORCE_ASYNCHRONOUS) and work on that. Another example is in the strong/eventual consistency - if I want to see the cache as strongly consistent, I can't read from backup owners [1]. Currently there is no option to force reading from primary owner, therefore, I was wondering whether it should be configurable (together with staggered gets policy - not that this would be implemented) or whether that should be specified as a flag - and it seems to me that it should not be configurable as the administrator could remove the flag from the config (and see increased performance) but eventually a race could occur where this flag matters and the application will behave incorrectly. WDYT? This question is obviously rather for changes on the roadmap (I'd say along with leaving ConcurrentMap interface) than any immediate actions in versions 7.x or 8.x. Radim [1] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-4995 -- Radim Vansa <rvansa(a)redhat.com&gt; JBoss DataGrid QA