GigaSpaces XAP 6.0 is GA
Posted 1 August 2007 @ 7:07 pm by Guy Nirpaz
After a long journey which lasted seven full months, I‘m proud to announce here the public availability of our flagship product, GigaSpaces XAP 6.0. XAP (pronounced zap) is aimed for XTP type of applications. XTP, which stands for, extreme transaction processing, is a class of applications characterized by low-latency, high-throughput and high-volume
requirements.
XAP we addresses the XTP challenge by providing a full platform containing many of the building blocks necessary to build such systems.
The objective we set to ourselves when we first envisioned XAP, was to "streamline SBA". In previous product releases we mainly focused on providing the runtime capabilities to enable infinite scalability by partitioning data across many JVMs spread across many machines. We came to realize that not only a platform should be scalable, it also needs to address fully the requirements of architects, developers, testers, project managers and operation engineers, along the life-cycle of the system. It was also very clear to us that SBA is the architecture which will eventually supersede the Tier Based Architecture.
OpenSpaces is a direct result of this effort. OpenSpaces is our new component model, based on Spring framework, which provides both ready to use SBA components and also provides consistent development, testing and deployment models based on industry standards. With OpenSpaces, developers and architects can simply and easily build XTP applications
which take advantage of the scalability and performance capabilities of XAP platform, by exploiting existing knowledge of Java and Spring.
OpenSpaces was built to encapsulate interaction patterns used by many of our existing customers in production systems. It's components, such as the event containers, are very useful as building blocks to build pojo based XTP applications.
Another area of the product which was dramatically revamped is .NET. With XAP XTP systems can be created from parts which are .NET and others that are pure java. With the object transformation technology in the product, pono and pojo objects are interchangeable between platforms in very effective manner, as low latency is key criteria in many XTP systems.
Many other areas in the product have changed for the better, including support for larger clusters (thousands of nodes), official support for Java 6 (we support java 1.4 onwards), JMS 1.1, JCA 1.5, latest application server‘s versions integration, and many more. A complete list of changes and
improvments can be found here.
To get started with XAP I recommend following one of the new quick start tutorials which cover usage of XAP in XTP scenario and in in-memory-data-grid scenarios.
I urge you all to download a trial version of the product and give it a spin, there is a lot to see. I will appreciate feedback of any kind,
regards,
Guy
