JavaGroups support

[Mike Klumpenaar <mk...@charter.net>]

I was wondering what the plans for the JavaGroups lateral cache implementation in the auxiliary-builds directory are? We've been using JCS for a few months in a single server configuration, however, we need to support a clustered configuration now and a JavaGroups based lateral cache seems to make a lot of sense for us. Especially since I would like to leverage their DistributedHashtable.

I've spent some time looking through the JavaGroupsCache code and it looks quite elegant and straight forward, but I just want to make sure there aren't any known problems with it. I found one issue when running the JavaGroupsCacheTest on my system where I had to introduce a delay between the cache initialization and usage. Without the delay the channels sometimes did not have time to form a group resulting in unsent update messages.

I also added a new attribute, RemoveOnUpdate, which sends a Request.REMOVE message instead of a Request.UPDATE message in response to a call to CacheAccess.put(), when set to true.

To summarize my questions:
1. Is there any intention of moving auxiliary-builds to the main source module?
2. Does JCS have any kind of release schedule (I noticed a JCS_1_0 tag, but it's quite old)?
3. How can I contribute any changes that I make?

Re: JavaGroups support

[James Taylor <ja...@jamestaylor.org>]

On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 01:42, Mike Klumpenaar wrote:
> I was wondering what the plans for the JavaGroups lateral cache
> implementation in the auxiliary-builds directory are? We've been using
> JCS for a few months in a single server configuration, however, we
> need to support a clustered configuration now and a JavaGroups based
> lateral cache seems to make a lot of sense for us. Especially since I
> would like to leverage their DistributedHashtable.
> 
> I've spent some time looking through the JavaGroupsCache code and it
> looks quite elegant and straight forward, but I just want to make sure

Thanks! ;)

>  there aren't any known problems with it. I found one issue when
> running the JavaGroupsCacheTest on my system where I had to introduce
> a delay between the cache initialization and usage. Without the delay
> the channels sometimes did not have time to form a group resulting in
> unsent update messages.

Yes it seems to have evolved some sort of startup delay requirement. I
haven't looked into that.

The code that is there predates a lot of the recent JavaGroups building
blocks (ReplicationManager, DistributedHashtable). Last I heard Bela was
actually looking at updating the auxiliary. I've not touched it since I
wanted to wait at least until DistHT/RepMan were completely implemented,
and have been quite busy with other things. 

> I also added a new attribute, RemoveOnUpdate, which sends a
> Request.REMOVE message instead of a Request.UPDATE message in response
> to a call to CacheAccess.put(), when set to true.
> 
> To summarize my questions:
> 1. Is there any intention of moving auxiliary-builds to the main source module?

No, I'd like to keep it seperate since it is an independent component.
Auxiliaries are essentially plugins, I'd like them all to be separate
builds with separate jars. It works fine that way.

> 2. Does JCS have any kind of release schedule (I noticed a JCS_1_0 tag, but it's quite old)?

No, not really. JCS development had pretty much stalled at this point,
other than fixing bugs that come up.

> 3. How can I contribute any changes that I make?

Submit patches!

Thanks,
James