Explicit Eviction API

This capability enables the application to explicitly evict objects from an LRU space. The eviction is not propagated to a backing database if there is such, and only affects the in-memory part of the space. For more details refer to this page.

Support for .Net 4

Starting from version 7.1.2, XAP.Net edition support version 4 of the .Net framework out of the box.

Spring 3.0.3 and Jetty 7.1

The embedded Spring and Jetty versions have been upgraded to the latest GA version of those products.
Please refer to the Jetty and Spring documentation for change log.

More Information in Web Based Dashboard

The web based dashboard now enables you to view much more information than in previous release. You can choose from 40 columns to reflect various details about the status and configuration or your processing units.

Version 7.1.1 is a service pack release on top of version 7.1.0 and as such is backwards compatible with it. In addition to a number of bug fixes on top of 7.1.0, It includes a collection of new features and improvements, which include support for the Spring security framework, all new web dashboard, memcached support and more. For the complete list of new features, fixed and known issues, please refer to the release notes.

Memcached support

Memcached is a distributed caching protocol, implemented initially by LiveJournal. It is interacted with over TCP sockets, providing a set of sixteen commands - mostly variants of read/write operations.
With GigaSpaces XAP 7.1.1, a space can be deployed with a memcached gateway enabled, which means that the memcached protocol is supported for that space. A memcached client can then connect to that server with absolutely no code changes.
The benefits are that XAP can provide easy write-behind and initial load semantics for memcached, which means memcached is also write-scalable. The standard XAP interfaces provide transactions, of course, so you can mix and match transactions with nontransactional operations - something other memcached implementations do not support.
The typical XAP applications also benefit from memcached in that our implementation of the protocol - not supporting transactions - becomes very fast for simple write operation
Click memcached for the full documenation.

Spring security support

Spring Security is one of the most mature and widely used Spring projects. As such it integrates natively with a wide range of external user registries such as LDAP servers and relational databases.
XAP 7.1.1 contains a "bridge" which allows users to leverage Spring security's support for those user registries and secure the GigaSpaces runtime environment and in memory data grid using any user registry that is supported by Spring security.
For more details please refer to this.

Revamped web based dashboard

The XAP dashboard is a web application which was designed to enable XAP users to quickly understand the state of a running XAP cluster and monitor the running components, i.e. physical hosts, JVMs and deployed processing units. It provides a lightweight alternative for monitoring a running cluster without the need to install the GigaSpaces XAP runtime and run the standalone Java-based user interface.
For more details please refer to this page.

Improved data access APIs

XAP 7.1.1 introduces two new data APIs.

The first is readByIds and takeByIds. It is the batch version of readById and takeById, and provides a very efficient and fast way to retrieve a set of objects from the space based on their ids.
Please refer to the GigaSpaces interface API documentation for more details.

The second one is support for Map objects as POJO properties. This enables you to use a plain java.util.Map with your POJOs and be able to query and index the values of this map, providing a more flexible data model which can be extended over time without the need to change the domain model or take down the system. Please refer to this page for more details.

Better mirror replication statistics in Admin API

In 7.1.1 we've added a number of new APIs to expose more information about the mirror service and enable easier and faster troubleshooting of database related issues. The new APIs expose stastics about the amount of operations performed by the mirror, anount of successful/failed operations and categorization of operations by type (insert, update, delete).
Please refer to this page for more details.

• Read our official release announcement here.

• Watch the recorded webinar on what's new in XAP 7.1, Hosted by Uri Cohen, GigaSpaces product manager:
  

• You may also find it useful to watch the following webinar, hosted by Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO, and Uri Cohen, product manager, which explains the concepts and details of the elastic data grid capabilities:
  

Release Candidate 2 (Released March 25, 2010)

Elastic Middleware Services (Technology Preview)

Brand new to 7.1, Elastic Middleware Services are designed to simplify the creation and management of data grids and processing units, and are designed to be completely abstracted from the applications that use them. Elastic Middleware Services are very similar to cloud-based middleware like Amazon SimpleDB, but the major difference is that they are enterprise-grade, and can also be run as part of your private data center, for use by your internal enterprise applications. Naturally they are based on the GigaSpaces data grid and utilize the GigaSpaced Administration and Monitoring API to deploy and manage these services.
The approach behind the Elastic Middleware Services is a simple high-level abstraction of a deployment request. The deployment request is characterized by declarative traits and mapped to physical resources. Currently, this capability is only exposed via the Administration and Monitoring API. More details on this new capability can be found here.

Web Based Management Console (Technology Preview)

Also new to 7.1 is the web based management console. This is an initial version of the tool that will eventually replace the current Swing-based UI. The current version allows basic monitoring capabilities of physical resources (JVMs and Hosts) and processing unit.
It is located under the <XAP 7.1 Installation Root>/tools/gs-webui directory, and can be started either in standalone mode or deployed as web application (using the provided .war file) to the GigaSpaces service grid or a third-party JEE web container.
Documentation of this new tool will be made available prior to the GA !release.

Release Candidate 1 (Released March 11, 2010)

Jetty 7.0 Support

The release embeds Jetty 7.0.1 instead of Jetty 6.1.2 (which was part of version 7.0 and previous milestone releases).
Jetty 7 contains many new features and improvements, most notably support for asynchronous request processing via asynchronous servlets and web sockets.

Milestones 7-9 (Milestone 9 Released Feb. 17, 2010)

Overflow to Disk of Replication Queue

This feature enables the space to transparently flush the replication queue to the disk when it reaches the maximum memory capacity.
This in turn provides a much more robust mechanism to handle temporary network disconnections and database failures (in case you're) using the mirror service to persist data asynchronously to an external data source.
The replication queue can be configured to have different behaviors when replicating to backup spaces and when replicating to a mirror service. For example, with a synchronous backup space, you may not want the primary space to accumulate a lot of data or even overflow to the disk to begin with when the backup becomes unavailable, since you prefer the backup to perform a full recovery from the primary when it reconnects to the primary. For a mirror service on the other hand you would prefer for the queue to be much larger without the ability to recover as it makes no sense in the case of a database. Please refer to this page for more details

Indexing for Field of Nested Objects

As part of the support for querying on nested objects which was first introduced in milestone 4, we have refactored the space indexing mechanism to support indexing on field of nested objects using path expressions.
The nice thing about this feature is that enables to control the indexing from the parent object, so you can use the same class as a nested object in more than one parent class, and control the indexing on a per parent class basis.
As part of this feature, we've introduced an new @SpaceIndex annotation which eases the configuration of such indexes. The indexType attribute of the @SpaceProperty annotation has been deprecated. Please refer to this page for more details about this feature.

.Net Administration & Monitoring API

In version 7.1, we have ported the very powerful and popular Java based Administration and Monitoring API to .Net. The .Net API supports all of the functionality that exists in the Java implementation, and enables .Net applications to implement comprehensive monitoring and dynamic SLA behaviors in .Net. Please refer to this page for more details.

Spring 3.0 Support

Spring 3.0 contains a wealth of new and exciting features. Milestone 9 replaces the Spring 2.5.6 with Spring 3.0, exposing all the new features within the GigaSpaces XAP runtime. Note that Spring 3.0 has a different jar structure (spring.jar is not provided any longer) which means that you will have to change the classpath of GigaSpaces applications that run outside of the GigaSpaces Service Grid runtime.

Milestones 4-6 (Milestone 6 Released Jan. 4, 2010)

Concurrency Improvements with Extended Indexes

The handling of multi-threaded queries on the same areas of extended btree indexes was significantly improved, providing up to %400 performance increase in highly multi-threaded scenarios. Extended indexes are used to provide order-aware indexes for object properties so that queries with "greater than" and "less than" operator are executed as efficiently as possible.

Custom Security Filters

Custom security filters allow users to plug into the new security mechanism (introduced in 7.0.1) and implement custom security policies, including instance based policies. For example, only allow a certain user to access a certain instance in the space if it was created by that specific user, or if the instance was created by a user from the same department. For more details click here. Please note that this feature is also available in version 7.0.2.

Query on Nested Objects

In addition to the features introduced in milestone 3 (see above), 7.1M6 includes support for ORDER BY and GROUP BY for nested fields. Click here for more details.

Distributed Transaction Metadata in BulkDataPersister

This functionality provides the ability to understand the boundaries of a distributed space transaction that was asynchronously replicated to the mirror service, and use this information to propagate the changes to the external data source (i.e. database) in a better manner. For more details, please click here.

Milestone 3 (First public milestone, Released Nov. 10, 2009)

On demand distributed dump and log gathering

This feature gives you the ability to generate a complete snapshot of the system's state on demand. This includes JVM thread and heap dumps, network utilization report, logs, space and processing unit dumps. Dump gathering can be done via the admin API or the UI (see image below - click t enlarge), and is supported for all the components of the GigaSpaces cluster (GSM, GSC, GSA, Space, processing unit, etc.).
This can become very handy when running large clusters and trying to monitor and troubleshoot multiple machines.

Logs view in the UI

This feature also significantly improves the ability to monitor and track a running system.
It allows you to see an up to date view of the log file of all the running components (GSC, GSM, GSA, LUS). This view is constantly updated (similar to the Unix tail -f command). In addition, you can filter log entries fetched from each of the services based on a regular expression (e.g. only message that contain the word INFO or WARN), search the log text that is displayed in the UI, and copy its contents to the clipboard. See image below (click to enlarge).
Note also that this functionality is also available via our administration and monitoring API.

Query on Nested Objects

This release includes an initial version of our planned query enhancements, which enables users to set query criteria on nested objects. For example, say you have a class named Person, which contains an embedded instance of a class named Address class.
Until this release, the only way to query on that instance was by using its natural equality and ordering capabilities (i.e. based on its equals() and compareTo() method, if implemented). So you could only compare at the level of the entire Address class. In this release, you can query on the fields of the Address class and fields of its nested classes in the following manner:

SQLQuery query = new SQLQuery(Person.class, "address.street.number = 1");

As you can see from the above example, you can navigate multiple level on the object graph (in this case 2 levels).
Note that this functionality does not yet support indexing and collections (which it will in future milestone releases).

Transaction Concurrency Improvements

In an effort to make our data grid even faster than it is today, we have done some very important optimizations around our transaction processing mechanism. We have significantly reduced the contention in this area of our code base, which resulted in significant performance improvements of transactional operations (up to 400% in some cases).