[infinispan-dev] Counters and their configurations in Infinispan server (DMR)

[Vladimir Blagojevic]

Hey guys,

How do you anticipate users are going to deal with counters? Are they 
going to be creating a lot of them in their applications, say dozens, 
hundreds, thousands?

I am asking because I have a dilemma about their representation in DMR 
and therefore in the admin console and potentially wider. The dilemma is 
related to splitting the concepts and the mapping between counter 
configuration and counter instances. On one end of the possible spectrum 
use, if users are going to have many counters that have the same 
configuration then it makes sense to delineate the DMR concept of the 
counter configuration and its counter instance just like we do for 
caches and cache configuration templates. We deal with cache 
configurations as templates; one could create hundreds of caches from 
the same template. Similarly, we can do with counters. On the other end 
if users are going to create very few counters then it likely does not 
make much sense to separate counter configurations from its instance, 
they would have one to one mapping. For each new counter, users would 
just enter counter configuration and launch an instance of a 
corresponding counter.

The first approach saves resources and makes large counter 
instantiations easier while the second approach is easier to understand 
conceptually but is inefficient if we are going to have many counter 
instance.

Thoughts?

Vladimir