The OpenSpaces.org community site launched in January. I was surprise by the rapid adoption of OpenSpaces since then, with lots of interesting innovations on things I didn't even think of. I'm sure that some of the projects will be very useful to many OpenSpaces users. This shows the value behind an ecosystem and community. Given the right tools, people will start collaborating and share things that otherwise would be buried in their hard disk, or in their mind.
The OpenSpaces.org site also provides a great tool for GigaSpaces Partners and individuals in the general developer community to expose their skills by publishing valuable content. A good example is GridDynamics, a GigaSpaces partner, who invested time and effort on producing high quality, well-documented projects.
The same goes for various people on the GigaSpaces team who came up with great ideas based on work that they did with customers. They use the OpenSpaces,org platform to share the tools they developed with other users in the community who might have similar needs. For example, the OpenSpaces demos project shows how to integrate Ajax, Spring MVC and OpenSpaces to scale a typical web application (market data front end, in this specific case).
Another good example is TGris, an extension of the testing grid framework that we use internally at GigaSpaces, and which several customers showed interest in for automating the testing of their own applications (note that the tool is not specific to OpenSpaces).
Another class of interesting projects are those that integrate OpenSpaces with various frameworks and APIs. These projects simplify the integration and adoption process, and shorten time-to-value. Good examples are the projects that provide integration for OpenSpaces/GigaSpaces with Amazon SimpleDB, JPA, and Memcached , as well as the Cache Integration project, which enables OpenSpaces/GigaSpaces support for many frameworks, such as Acegi Security, Cocoon, Jetty, iBatis, OpenJPA, Velocity and others.
Other people built entire functional applications, such as Leonardo Gocalves's GoDo - Goods Donation System (see details below), and Jim Liddle's MobileGSFeed, which provides a scalable solution for handling Atom feeds through the iPhone. Jim actually runs our Sales in the UK & Ireland. Never in my dreams did I imagine that OpenSpaces.org would be used by sales guys :-)
Anyway, I'm very pleased to let you know that we reached an important milestone for OpenSpaces two weeks ago when we reached the deadline of the developer contest. Fourteen candidates made it to the final stages. Only three will be finalists. A distinguished panel of judges interviewed each contestant. The judges are Adrian Colyer, CTO, SpringSource; Joe Ottinger, Editor, TheServerSide.com; John Davies; Julian Brown, Architecture Consultant, RWE; Keerat Sharma, Platform Engineer, Gallup; and Ross Mason, Co-founder and CTO, MuleSource.
All of the candidates put up a real good fight and made it very hard for the judges to reach their final decision. The winners of the contest will be announced in a nice venue in Prague during TheServerSide Java Symposium event. Stay tuned for updates on the exact date and venue here and on The GigaSpaces Blog and web site. We also intend to publish interviews with each of the finalist project owners and post them in a blog.
Here are some of the interesting projects (in alphabetical order). The full list of projects can be found here.
- Convergence - integration of Compute Grids (e.g., DataSynapse) with In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG). By Kirill Uvaev
- DomainProxy - An extension enabling rich domain models with domain relationships to be transparently used with OpenSpaces. Essentially, a JPA implementation on top of spaces. By Jason Carreira.
- Examples of Dynamic Scripting with Groovy Several examples of dynamic scripting with Groovy, which demonstrate various techniques of using Groovy with GigaSpaces XAP. By Ed Crandell
- Amazon SimpleDB as External Data Source - Amazon SimpleDB as an external data source for OpenSpaces persistence. An alternative to Hibernate backed data source. By Chen Wang
- Gigapult - A JRuby-based domain-specific language designed to specify all aspects of grid configurations in an intuitive and readable way. By Kirill Ishanov
- GigaSpaces BPEL Engine An engine for executing BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard workflows on top of GigaSpaces XAP. By Mihai Lucian
- GoDo - Goods Donation System - A distributed application that connects people who wish to make donations with those in need of the donations. By Leonardo Goncalves
- Maven 2 OpenSpaces Tools - Maven plug-in allowing GigaSpaces application developers to easily build, assemble and deploy OpenSpaces applications. By Jin Kim
- OpenSpaces Binary Calculator - An application that uses experimental approach for capacity measurement. By Victor Samoylov
- PackRat - A library that will help increase space capacity by packing the Entities. By Alexander Kuznetsov
- SpaceMemcached - Memcached implementation based on Grizzly (NIO framework) and GigaSpaces (as a distributed cache). By Steve Tzou
- TGris - A distributed testing grid that runs on top of GigaSpaces XAP. By Igor Goldenberg
- Web Hits Aggregator - Connector for PHP - A generic connector for PHP that supports GigaSpaces XAP capabilities, including Take, TakeMultiple, Read, ReadMultiple, Write, Lease and Transaction. By Moshe Kaplan
Please join one of the projects or start a new one yourself. If you already developed something, but are concerned about the time it will take to initiate a new project -- don't be! It is extremely easy and quick to start a new project and if you need any help, we're ready to support you.
