IBM ObjectGrid Distributed Transactional Cache Available

by Floyd Marinescu on Jul 06, 2006 |

IBM has been quietly working on ObjectGrid, a distributed cache product as part of their Websphere Extended Deployment platform. ObjectGrid however is available as a standalone product that can work in other commercial or open source appservers. Some key differentiators include transactional access, authorized cache access via JAAS, scalability to 100's of JVMs, etc. An evaluation version of ObjectGrid is now available from IBM (11 MB download) which is fully functional on time-limited basis (functions for an hour after every restart). ObjectGrid is available to WebSphere Exended Deployment and also standalone licensing.

ObjectGrid can be used in a peer to peer fashion or a multi-tier where an ObjectGrid server coordinates with front-end JVMs to move data around. The interface into ObjectGrid is the Map based like most similar products (except Terracotta which clusters at the JVM level); the ObjectMap interface has insert/get/update/remove/invalidate verbs as well as access to indexes for queries. "But, we don't endorse the Java Map API for caches as it's not suitable and has many issues. Our ObjectMap interface is similar to be Map but doesn't extend it. We provide limited Java Map support using a helper class available on the ObjectMap", Billy Newport (Websphere XD lead) mentioned to InfoQ.

On the advanced features of ObjectGrid, Billy said:

It offers full support for map partitioning and replication. It offers full integration with Spring from a configuration point of view. It offers an open architecture for all advanced capabilities. There are plugin points for all extension points. Open source projects such as Jofti have mentioned that ObjectGrid is the only cache product with builtin integration hooks for third party indexing. It includes a servlet 2.3 filter which allows HTTP sessions to be persisted to an ObjectGrid cluster using affinity or no affinity. Full distributed locking is supported. It leverages the HAManager from WebSphere 6.0 even in standalone mode. It allows recoverable cache preloading which is important when a JVM loading gigabytes of data fails at 99% completion. The backup process can resume from 99% instead of restarting from scratch. It was designed from the ground up for security and can integrate with any security system for both authentication as well as authorization. We support builtin indexing of data held in the cache using advanced optimistic algorithms which ensure high performance in the presence of R/W transactions. It offers a true client/grid model where clients can have a local ObjectGrid which pulls/pushes from a grid which is shared between clients. This offers support for thousands of clients if necessary.

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Community comments

JAAS by Billy Newport Posted

Consistency by Mikael Gueck Posted

Re: Consistency by Floyd Marinescu Posted

Re: Consistency CSQL Cache Distributed Cache using Main Memory database by kanchana p Posted

How to get it for free... by Jason Carreira Posted

Re: How to get it for free... by Floyd Marinescu Posted

Re: How to get it for free... by Billy Newport Posted

Distributed Cache Comparison by pascal stern Posted

JAAS by Billy Newport

Obviously it can work with JAAS but more importantly any non JAAS security system (and there are many) can be plugged in also. Acegi from Spring should also be integratable pretty easily.

Consistency by Mikael Gueck

What was that Open Source thing you were speaking of, IBM?

How to get it for free... by Jason Carreira

Hey, allright! I'm going to set up a cluster of machines sharing the distributed cache and set them each to reboot every 55 minutes! ObjectGrid will rebuild caches and keep going when a node goes down, right? ;-)

Re: Consistency by Floyd Marinescu

What was that Open Source thing you were speaking of, IBM?

I believe Billy was saying that you can run ObjectGrid in any Java EE appserver, be it commercial or open source.

Re: How to get it for free... by Floyd Marinescu

Hey, allright! I'm going to set up a cluster of machines sharing the distributed cache and set them each to reboot every 55 minutes! ObjectGrid will rebuild caches and keep going when a node goes down, right? ;-)

Hey, now that would be a great test of it's HA features. You'd have to stagger the shut downs to allow for other nodes to fail over to.

Re: How to get it for free... by Billy Newport

Damn :)
Yep, you could do that but you still can't go in to production with it given the license. It's funny, I was thinking this as we were discussing the best way to time bomb it without crippling it function wise in any way

Distributed Cache Comparison by pascal stern

Hi Bill
How do you differentiate ObjectGrid with other competitors like Coherence from Tangosol ?
It seems that both have identical features :
transactional access, authorized cache access via JAAS, scalability ...

Re: Consistency CSQL Cache Distributed Cache using Main Memory database by kanchana p

CSQL cache provides updateable bidirectional table granular cache for any database system.

For it capabilities check this blog

Project sourceforge.net website

If you planning to use it for production purposes, then you shall get support from Lakshya solutions. check this site for more info on this