XAP 7.0 Is on the Move!

After the release of GigaSpaces XAP 6.6, we are now deep into the planning and development of our next major release, 7.0. This release, which is due in mid 2009, will include a few major themes, such as significantly better administration and monitoring capabilities, network resources optimizations, highly optimized and flexible local cache, reduced memory footprint, improved deployment model and support for deployment on the cloud.

If you've been following us in the past few years, you know that our R&D is practicing SCRUM for quite a while now as part of the development process. Our head of R&D, Guy Nirpaz, has talked about it numerous times to both our users and the development community at large. The nature of SCRUM and the fact that it's composed of sprints enable us to share recently developed features with our community, as we've done in the past for versions 6.5 and 6.6.

Our sprints last two weeks, at the end of which we publish the results of the sprint as an early access milestone release. Our 7.0 early access program already includes the first two milestone releases, which you can download and play with. We will be happy to hear any feedback you have. The first two milestones include the following highlights:

• Significantly improved cache eviction policies (most notably a new LRU implementation) which improves LRU performance by a factor of 10 to 20 times (depending on the operation) for read operations without impacting write operation performance
• Support for time based window scenarios by maintaining the entry lease as part of the POJO instance. You can now annotate a field with the @SpaceLeaseExpiration annotation and the space will use it to store and retrieve the lease expiration time for the instance. This value can later be propagated to an external data source. Based on it, expired instances can be filtered out of the space when loaded from the database.
• The UI now enables you to the processing unit elements and the space cluster that belong to it in the same tab, so you have a coherent and intuitive view on your application components in one location. It also contains a summary view of all the space cluster details which enables you to quickly understand how your space cluster is functioning and what state it's in, as shown below:
  
  
  
  
• Ultra Fast Native local cache for XAP .Net - we have implemented our very own ConcurrentHashMap like data structure in .Net, which enables you to enjoy a performance of millions of ID based read operations per second
  
• SQL query optimizations: the space now processes SQL queries with OR staements in parallel, taking advantage of multi-core environments for reduced overall query times
  
• Improved CLI deployment support: your deployment command will now only return after all application instances have been provisioned, enabling you to create complex scripts to deploy multiple dependant processing units

Naturally, there's a lot more than meets the eyes, and we're continuing to work on new and exciting stuff. You can stay tuned using our 7.0 early access page.

Happy new year,
Uri