The GigaSpaces Blog

Multi-tenancy: does it have to be that hard?

Nati Shalom — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:30:43 +0000

Multi-tenancy is a term that is used often in the context of SaaS applications. In general, multi-tenancy refers to the ability to run multiple users of an application on a shared infrastructure. The main motivation for doing this is efficiency,...

New Service Grid Admin API for .NET

.Net Team — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:46:12 +0000

New to XAP.NET 7.1 is the service grid admin API. This API is vast and provides capabilities for managing the entire GigaSpaces environment in a simple fashion. It can be used for many different uses such as monitoring statistics and the state of the different components. Another common usage would be to write agents programatically [...]

The Missing Piece in the Virtualization Stack (Part 2)

Nati Shalom — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:40:09 +0000

In the first part of this post, I discussed how virtualization and cloud computing, as we know it today, is only a small part of the solution for today’s IT inefficiencies. While new technologies and delivery models have made it...

Custom Matching-Two Dimensional Cartesian space Comparison using GigaSpaces

Shay Hassidim — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:31:25 +0000

Usually you index and execute queries using primitive fields (long, float, string, etc). The fields may be within the root level of the space object, or embedded within nested objects within the space object. You may construct a query using a template object or SQL to specify the criteria you would like to use [...]

Interview with Michael Di Stefano from Integrasoft on their CEP Cloud Services using Esper GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:59:02 +0000

During the past few weeks I had the honor to have a discussion with one of our partners Integrasoft who developed a distributed Complex Event Processing engine on top of Esper a popular opensource Complex Event Processing engine and recently...

Web Client/Server

Guy Nirpaz — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:46:22 +0000

I’ve been working on a new project using GWT. Being the only developer of my team, I’ve started with prototyping the user interface interaction model and was looking for a framework that will help me go fast, without a need too change to many paradigms. As I’m building a SaaS product, it has to be web, so I was browsing for various alternatives for web development.

Basically, I had two options:

Content Driven – create bunch of HTML documents for basic interaction and later enhance these with JavaScript (AJAX) for more dynamic feel
Application Driven – build rich client application using modern development tools such as GWT or Flex and add server-side integration later.

I have taken the second approach and used GWT as I’m familiar with Java and Eclipse so the ramp up was fast enough.

I came about using principles from Test Driven Development (TDD). I used a TODO list to make sure I’m focused on a single specific task without thinking about infrastructure layers at all. I had to make sure I’m not looking at the big picture while doing the little things, as I wasn’t interested at all in optimization and long-term thinking. Coming from an architecture mind-set, I had to control my tendency to think about the system while doing UI coding.

My working methodology was something like:

Step 1: Create a screen using GWT and make sure it looks right

Step 2: Add client-side, mock data to fill the tables and grids I’m using just to make sure the interaction model is what I’m looking for

Step 3: Data is encapsulated into some kind of Data Provider abstraction that is still static and within the client, however it is not part of the view anymore

Step 4: Data is moved to the server and as the Data Provider is enhanced with data loading capabilities

Step 5: Server starts to create dynamic data based on real data sources and instead of dummy data sets

Through this exercise I learned something which wasn’t clear to me prior

As client side development is much simpler than server side interaction between the various tier, I was able to move extremely fast in building the right interaction model for the client application
The architecture that has evolved from this approach is of modern two-tiers approach, similar the the old client/server model but in internet age. Most of the functionality is being done within the client where as the serer serves as a data provider. Coming to think of it, this is a huge opportunity for web driven database which support web protocols – HTTP, REST and query capabilities.

It simply struck me. I don’t consider myself the fastest developer, I’ve been privileged to manage some of the top talent out there, so I know where I stand. Still, the opportunity RIA, web enabled middleware services and the cloud presents something unseen before, as we are finally getting to the right level of abstraction in building internet applications.

From my perspective, the days of page-driven web development for applications, and super-complex packages such as JEE with tiered MVC are long gone. Although I’m telling a known secret here, those who are going to leverage fast cloud enablement technologies will gain tremendous advantage of those who don’t.

The Missing Piece in the Virtualization Stack (Part 1)

Nati Shalom — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:21:39 +0000

This and the next post will discuss how virtualization and cloud computing, as we know it today, is only a small part of the solution for today’s IT inefficiencies. While new technologies and delivery models have made it much simpler...

Application Monitoring as a Service with New Relic and GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:26:00 +0000

Application monitoring has become a core component of IT infrastructure. It gives you a view of what’s happening to your applications at the higher level. With this information, you can detect anomalies and prevent failure before it happens, analyze trends...

Moving into Production Checklist

Shay Hassidim — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 19:11:55 +0000

You are about to complete your existing project , all the functionality is in place , all unit tests are passing , profiling done and there are no visible bottlenecks , benchmarks been executed and the system seems to scale and perform nicely: You (think you) are ready to move the system into production to [...]

The Common Principles Behind the NOSQL Alternatives

Nati Shalom — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:01:04 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing the drive behind the demand for a new form of database alternatives, often referred to as NOSQL. A few weeks ago during my Qcon presentation, I went through the patterns of...