A Couple Minutes With Some Toolkit Samples

Last night we released Beta 2 of the Terracotta 3.3 release. It has a number of improvements and updates to the Terracotta Toolkit including improved naming and factoring and additional clustered classes like AtomicLong and List. You can grab that or to get the absolute latest you can grab a nightly (my preference because the beta doesn't work with maven)

I pushed a couple of toolkit samples to GitHub (which by the way is awesome!). I didn't do hardly any cleanup or comments so just post questions to the blog if you need help.

http://github.com/sharrissf/Terracotta-Tools-and-Samples/

If your a Git user already I don't need to tell you how to check it out. If your not just hit "download source" on the upper right of the web page and don't worry about Git.

Four examples are included:

PlayingWithMapOfLocksExpress - A quick sample that show's how to create a clustered Map of Locks.

PlayingWithToolkitBarrier - Example of using a Cyclic barrier to coordinate between processes

PlayingWithToolkitClusterInfo - Example showing how to register a listener for cluster events.

PlayingWithToolkitQueue - Little sample on using a queue between two nodes

PlayingWithToolkitClusterCounter - Basic sample that show's using a clustered atomic long

You can run these from the command line by:

1. Downloading and unpacking the nightly build or beta from Terracotta
2. Staring the Terracotta server by calling the ./bin/start-tc-server.sh
3. Running 2 instances of the compiled versions of any of the above

java -cp target:INSTALL_DIR/common/terracotta-toolkit-1.0-runtime-ee-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar PlayingWithToolkitClusterInfo

You can also run them using the Terracotta Maven Plugin:

mvn tc:run

To switch between the samples edit the pom.xml

A Couple Minutes With The Terracotta 3.3 Beta

With Terracotta platform version 3.3 our goal of creating an accessible application performance and scale-out solution is taking another big step forward. It's important to us that developers can find success using the ubiquitous Ehcache for performance, Hibernate for an ORM, Http Web Sessions for user state and Quartz for scheduling in a single node application. Then, without much thought or effort, add a couple lines of config to achieve scale-out and HA serving needs all the way through enterprise apps and into the cloud.

We have focused on a couple of high level areas in this release to take our solution to the next level.

• Simple Scale - Reduce the need for tuning and tweaking with an improved next gen datastore. It will allow the everyday user to achieve the kinds of scale needed for massive applications both in data size and number of nodes.

• Improved Visibility - We have added panels for Quartz and Sessions to our developer console giving full visibility to the full suite of performance and scale-out products. We have also added a more product focused organization of information in the tool.

• Simple HA - A new panel that makes it easier to monitor interesting events that occur in a cluster. Pre-built templates for various configurations. Simplified way of migrating nodes, better defaults.

• Modularity - We have exposed some of our most powerful pieces and parts as a versioned standard API that can be simply coded against to get things like, locking, queuing, maps and cluster topology. We use this API to build all four of our core products (Ehcache, Quartz, Hibernate 2nd level cache, Web Sessions).

While not everything made into the beta, enough is there to get a taste of where we are going. I encourage people to download it and try it as soon as possible. GA is just around the corner. Learn more on the release notes page.