[rules-dev] Drools Grid - Request for Feedback/Comments

[Mauricio Salatino]

Hi All,
I'm writing this email to request some comments/feedback about Drools Grid.
The project is highly experimental and I was playing with it for some
time now. We are using it in a project where its doing its job and
it's quite decent. There are some aspects of the project that can be
improved and that's the main reason why I'm writing this email.

Because this project is experimental I would like to know the future
direction of it. If there are other alternative to the features
proposed by grid I'm OK with working on the new approaches to achieve
the same results.

For the ones that doesn't know what is inside grid let me list some of
its features:

  * It provides an API based on GridNodes that allows us to represent
a box that can host our knowledge sessions and a set of services
  * It provides all the Session Virtualization APIs and internal
mechanisms that allows us to instantiate remote sessions in remote
machines/jvms
  * It provides some experimental components like: WhitePages and Schedulers

I'm OK with changing the APIs and how the components are linked
together, but in this occasion I'm worried about the Session
Virtualization features. The session virtualization layer right now is
tied to Mina and the code that is used to make everything works
remotely is getting bigger and bigger. Most of the code inside these
features can be improved and it's not perfect but it's getting
complete, at least for the use case where I'm working for, that it's
quite extensive.

Can we reuse this code or at least some bit of it for the simulation
framework remoting stuff? If we can't I would like to be sure that at
least with the simulation framework we will be able to achieve the
same results in some way or another.

I can also spend some time to provide different transports for the
ones that are afraid of Mina, that's not a problem. What I would like
to see is that we are working on all the components that we need to
compose a knowledge grid and then write the APIs that fits to the
practical use cases.

I'm right now cleaning some improvements and fixes that will make grid
compile again inside the master. I can keep that code updated and be
responsible for it or I can start working in a different alternative
that has more probabilities of survive.

Any comments/feedback?


-- 
 - CTO @ http://www.plugtree.com
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 - Salatino "Salaboy" Mauricio -