Overview

GigaSpaces XAP (pronounced zap) is a scale-out application server. Developers and architects who are looking to develop web-based, transactional applications, with high-throughput, low-latency and scalability, may want to use it to build their next generation class of applications.

Enterprise-level application servers (also known as Java™ EE - formerly J2EE™), were last truly designed and deployed in the late 1990's, and their prime focus was to solve the problems encountered in deploying applications for the web. Prior application servers relied on rich application clients for interactivity, which made maintenance and management almost impossible, unless restrictions on platform were used - and if you know of an enterprise that limits its web access to, say, IE6, then you know those restrictions haven't altogether been avoided.

For this reason, these application servers focused mainly on resource management, and provided the means for web application deployment, such as web-containers, EJB containers for business logic processing, and a data-access layer for interaction with external data sources, mainly relational databases.

GigaSpaces XAP is a new bread of universal application server that focus on solving the scalability problem across all applications tiers. It allows the application to avoid bottlenecks at the web , service and data access layers. The web and service tiers using a powerful In-Memory-Data-Grid (IMDG) storing application data as objects. The IMDG can span multiple machines and serve large amount of concurrent users. By deploying both the web, service and IMDG into GigaSpaces application server the application enjoy the ability to collocate business-logic with the data avoiding unnecessary remote calls, scale easily, have fast response time and survive failures.

CCF4XAP Stands for Cloud Computing Framework 4 GigaSpaces XAP. It brings the value of cloud computing to existing enterprise applications, relying on GigaSpaces XAP to deliver the core application middleware capabilities. GigaSpaces XAP, the scale-out application server, bridges the gap between on-demand hardware scalability and on-demand application scalability.

This Tutorial introduces GigaSpaces XAP and CCF4XAP. In the course of this lab, users will provision an IMDG and supporting services to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and then modify the Spring Pet Clinic application to run in that environment. Attendees will also learn how to benchmark IMDG in the cloud and how to dynamically scale cloud services according to SLAs.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have some basic knowledge of, or programming experience in, the following technologies:

• Java™ EE platform
• Familiarity with the Spring framework is a plus

You will need to refer to the accompanying presentation during the tutorial.
System Requirements

• Supported OSes: Solaris™M 8/9/10 Operating System (OS), OpenSolaris™ Operating System (OS), Linux, Windows, Mac OS X 10.4+
• Memory requirement: 512MB
• Disk space requirement: 300MB

Software Needed For This Tutorial

Please install the following set of software. If you have any questions on installation, please feel free to send questions to the lab forum mentioned below.

• NetBeans IDE 6.0 (or more recent). Make sure you use the Java Bundle.
• Java SE 5.0 (or more recent).
• Tutorial zip file.

Tutorial Exercises

• Exercise 0 - Install and Configure Lab Environment
• Exercise 1 - Using the Amazon Elastic Cloud
• Exercise 2 - Using the GigaSpaces Management Center
• Exercise 3 - Porting the PetClinic to GigaSpaces
• Exercise 4 - Deploying the PetClinic on Cloud

Additional Resources

• The 5564_cloudspetclinic presentation includes high level description of the tutorial.

Where To Go For Help

• GigaSpaces Cloud Framework for XAP Forum
• GigaSpaces Cloud Team

What's Next?

go to the next step - The Exercise 0 - Install and Configure Lab Environment.