Some Things that Kept Us Busy Lately

It's been a quite while since I last posted, but things have been more active than ever here at GigaSpaces. I'm writing this on the way back from Tokyo and HK, where I've had a few days packed with meetings with partners, prospects and customers (and of course good food and drinks…). It sometimes amazes me what people actually do and plan to do with our product, but I must admit that this time I was really blown away by some of the things I saw. Besides some very interesting meetings with number of financial institutions (many of which actually want to take advantage of the current crisis seeking to upgrade and improve their systems so that they'll be ready when things pick up), I also met companies from other sectors that are taking the product to uncharted territories, but in a good sense. Just to give you a taste of things (hopefully I will be able to discuss them in detail in a separate post), one of our customers implemented a system to share complex 3D models between designers and perform various types of simulations on it, doing real time sharing through GigaSpaces. Since they chose .Net as the implementation platform for this application, they used GigaSpaces XAP .Net to perform the model sharing, and when you see in your eyes how a complex and details 3D model is loaded from one client and gradually appears on a bunch of other machines, this is truly impressive.
It also made me proud to see that many of our new features are adopted and used widely. Which brings me to the main topic – what kept us busy lately.
First of all, we have released our 6.6 branch in September, which might well be the first version to truly offer an end-to-end application platform. Some of the things. Here's a glimpse of what it offers:

• Standard JEE web application support (via the Jetty web container)
  
• An optimized, native .Net distribution (named XAP .Net), with full SBA capabilites
  
• A brand new task processing API (including peer classloading capabilities)
  
• Support for dynamic language invocation across the grid
  
• Further enhancements of our remoting capabilities
  
• Maven integration
  
• Improved annotation support for configuring messaging and remoting components
  
• Asyncronous operations 
  
• Out of the box integration with the Mule ESB
  
• Seamless interoperability between Java, .Net and C++
  
• UI improvements 
  
• Optimizations, optimizations, optimizations…
  
• Revamped documentation web site
  

I encourage you all to give it a try and provide us your feedback. You can find the complete list of changes and enhancements here. 
Besides the official 6.6 release (we've just released 6.6.2 - which I'll discuss in a separate post), we have also invested significant effort in integrating GigaSpaces with cloud and virtualization vendors. The integration package with Amazon EC2 enables you in a single click to provision EC2 instances, install GigaSpaces XAP on them, start GigaSpaces containers and deploy your application to them. Furthermore, it can also provision a MySql database that sits on top of Amazon EBS, and an apache load balancer incase you deployed a web application. Monitoring is done through our stadard user interface, which runs on the cloud and is displayed automatically as a local window on your pc. And the nice part of it is that it's all done via a web application, so no special installation is required to use it. We are currently at beta stages with this offering, and will soon make it publicly available. In fact, we already have quite a few customers that are using XAP on EC2 in production.

On another front, we have completely revamped our training offering (this is a good chance to thank Tricode, our Dutch partners, for taking this on and providing high quality results).The syllabus and details will soon be made available on our web site. The general idea was to create a modular training for various target audiences besides the usual core training (which was also completely rewritten). We offer both on site and public training. We will publish the next available schedule soon.

On the performance benchmarks front, Shay Hassidim, out deputy CTO, has been conducting numerous benchmarks in the last few months, which cover many aspects such as scalability, latency, web application performance and more. These benchmarks are posted from regularly in our company blog, and we have categorized them all for your convenience under one category. We will of course keep doing these benchmarks to provide more insights to our customers and prospects about how the product behaves in various scenarios.

That's it for this time - plane is about to land and they'll take my laptop if I don't close it :)