Multi-Site Replication Module

The multi-site replication module has now become a first class citizen within the data grid and no longer uses the mirror service. This means that it now supports long periods of disconnections, the ability to work side by side with other replication targets (such as a mirror replicating to a relational database) and support for delegation and various topologies (hub-spoke, multi-master, ring and tree). For more details please refer to the documentation.

Initial Processing Unit Grouping Support

The web based dashboard includes initial support for grouping multiple processing units to an application. It allows users to monitor the resources and view alerts that are related to a specific group. Until an official API will be provided, the groups are assigned to each processing unit at deployment time using the {{com.gs.application} deployment property.

Jetty 7.4 support

The embedded Jetty container used for deploying web processing units has been upgraded to Jetty version 7.4.0.

Improved Web UI Dashboard with Alerts View

The dashboard view now gives you a single click view of the entire cluster, including alerts on various problematic conditions. The previous view is now available under the topology tab. This is the first stage in the new Web based UI planned for XAP. You can find more details about it here.

Support for Elastic Stateless and Web Processing Units

The elastic deployment model introduced in 8.0 for stateful and data grid only processing units has now been extended to support stateless and web processing units. You can scale web applications and stateless processing units up and down based on CPU, memory or available resources.

Document (Schema-Free) API support for .Net

The .Net edition now includes the all new document API which was introduced in the 8.0.0 in the Java version. It enables you to maintain a completely flexible domain model without any restrictions on the entry's schema, and add/remove properties as your application evolves. It also simplifies interoperability with Java since when using the Document API it's no longer tied to a concrete .Net and Java classes.

Improved complex object handling for .Net

The .Net edition now enables you to query and index complex object structures, including nested collections and arrays.

Deep POJO/PONO - Document Interoperability

Documents and POJOs can now be mixed interchangeably across all nesting level. You can read a document as a POJO/PONO (assuming its type name corresponds to the POJO/PONO class name) and vice versa. The space will convert between the formats across all nesting levels, so if you have a complex Java object for example which contains a reference to a nested Java Object or a collection of nested objects, the space will convert the entire object graph to documents and sub documents. In addition, you can also define a "bag" of dynamic properties for a certain POJO/PONO so that new properties that are added via the document API to the entry are exposed in the POJO/PONO instance via this bag.

Map/Reduce and Native Query Support for JPA

The XAP JPA Implementation now supports the JPA NativeQuery facility. On top of running queries in the Space's native syntax, it also enables you to actually execute Space tasks across one or all cluster nodes and bring the power of the grid to the JPA API. Tasks can be defined using the GigaSpaces task execution interfaces or even as a dynamic language script for scripting languages that are supported as part of the JVM.

Method Level Routing Handlers and Result Reducers for Space Based Remoting

Space Based Remoting has traditionally been a very popular facility to reliably expose scalable business services to your application clients. In 8.0.1, you can specify method level behaviors for the foundational remoting constructs such as {{RemoteRoutingHandler}}s and {{RemoteResultReducer}}s via the dedicated @ExecutorRemotingMethod and @EventDrivenRemotingMethod annotations.

WAN Replication Improvements

8.0.1 adds a number of important improvements and bug fixes to the [replication over WAN module], such as better peer classloading behavior (when the classes written to the space are not part of the space's classpath), better cleanup of replicated entries, and support for replication of .Net entries.

Improved Performance of .Net Executor API

The .Net task execution API has gone some optimization in the way that tasks are passed to the space and executed in it, which resulted in performance boosts of up to 250%.

More JPA Improvements

In addition to NativeQuery support, we have also implemented a number of other changes, including better JPQL syntax support (LIKE, IS NULL), optimistic locking support and improved relationship handling.

Improved XA Transaction Support

XA transactions can now work against a partitioned space cluster as a single XA resource (via the distributed Jini transaction manager) rather than working with each partition separately.

Mule 3.1 Support

The build in Mule ESB support has been ungraded to support Mule version 3.1.

Release Candidate 2 and GA (GA Released Jan. 31, 2011)

Elastic Processing Unit Support

The Elastic Processing Unit is a Processing Unit with additional capabilities that greatly simplify its deployment and administration across multiple machines. Machines and Containers are automatically provisioned based on Memory and CPU requirements. When a machine failure occurs, or when scale requirements change, new machines are provisioned and the Processing Unit is balanced automatically. Please refer to this page for more details.

Multi Site Deployment Support

GigaSpaces now includes the [ability to setup asynchronous replication between multiple space clusters], with support for multi-master replication, batching and more. This is ideal for geographically distributed deployments and DRP scenarios.

Indexing on Nested Collection Elements

This functionality allows you allows you to index fields of POJO contained in nested collections (within other POJOs), at any nesting level.
Please refer to this page for more details.

Dynamic Indexing

This release support dynamic (add hoc) indexing of any property in your space entries. This can be done via the UI (by clicking the "Add" button on the left of the indexes table in the Data Types view), or via an API call.

.Net Pre and Post Primary Events Support

This enables .Net processing unit components to be called when fail-over occurs and a backup becomes a primary.

Replication Channel State in Admin API and System Dump Report

The replication channel state is now available in the admin API. When generating a system dump on GSCs that have space instances running on them, the dump will also include the channel state and the history of the 50 latest replication events (hand shakes, connections, disconnections and other relevant details which are important for troubleshooting).

Alert Gateway to SNMP and Other Logging Target

With [this adpater], you can turn alerts into SNMP traps or send it to any other logging target, such as JMS, socket and other appenders supported by log4j and other logging frameworks. This allows for smooth integration or the alerting mechanism with 3rd party monitoring tools.

Release Candidate 1 (Released Jan. 4, 2011)

Replication Improvements

New replication mechanism is now used by default. It provides significantly better performance for both primary-to-backup and primary-to-mirror replication (up to 50%), as well as significantly lower network overhead (up to 35% less than the old mechanism) and better failure handling in split brain scenarios. New users do not need to configure anything to take advantage of it. For users of version 7.1 or lower, who wish to upgrade to 8.0, more details can be found here.

In addition to the above improvements, the replication module now exposes more statistics via the Admin API. Specifically, the network bandwidth utilization and number of replication packets sent per second are now exposed via this API. Please refer to the Javadoc of the OutgoingnChannel class for more details.

JPA

The JPA adapter now support the JOIN syntax for @OneToMany relationships, which are modeled as collections within the One side of the relationship. e.g. SELECT o from Owner o JOIN o.pets p WHERE p.name = :name. Please refer to this page for more details.

JDBC Support for Documents

JDBC now enables the user query Space Documents as well as JDBC tables and POJOs.

GSA support in CLI

The CLI now enables the user to control the life cycle of the GigaSpace Agent - start GSCs, GSMs and lookup services, as well as shutdown the GSA itself. Please refer to this page for more details.

Milestones 10 and 11 (Milestone 11 released Dec. 27, 2010)

Collection Support in SQLQuery

The SQLQuery mechanism now supports querying on nested collections via a very intuitive syntax, e.g:

SQLQuery<Company> query = new SQLQuery<Company>(Company.class, "employees[*].name = 'John Doe'");

The above query retrieves all the companies who have at least one employee named John Doe.

This syntax also supports deep nesting, e.g:

SQLQuery<Company> query = new SQLQuery<Company>(Company.class, "departments[*].employees[*].name = 'John Doe'");

The above query retrieves all the companies who have at least one department that has an employee named John Doe.

Indexing of nested collections will be supported in one of the future milestones.

For more details please refer to this page

JPA

JPA Now supports the MEMBER OF syntax. Please refer to this page for more details.

Local Cache and Local View for Document API

The new Document API now support the ultra-fast local view and local cache for near caching of data at the client side. For more details please refer to this section.

Milestone 9 (released Nov. 28, 2010)

JPA

This milestone release includes initial support for the JPA API on top of the space. It currently includes basic java.persistence.EntityManager support, queries, one to one relationships and transaction. For more details refer to this page.

Document API

This milestone release also includes initial support for our new document API. The goal of this API is to enable a flexible data schema without the strictness associated with static types. The document API enables you to add and remove properties from document instances on the fly, write and query on any level of nesting (i.e. documents within documents) and use all of the familiar GigaSpaces space operations.
Future milestone releases will include support for dynamic (add-hoc) indexing, querying and indexing of collections elements an other goodies. For more details refer to this page.

Milestone 8 (released Nov. 15, 2010)

Log view in Web UI

You can now view the log output of grid services (GSM, GSC, LUS, GSA) from the web UI. Simply click the small drop-down icon near each component and choose "Show Logs", as shown below.

Processing unit deployment and undeployment support in Web UI

You can now deploy and undeploy processing units, data grids and memcached deployments directly from the web UI. You can deploy either packaged processing units (.jar or .war files) or existing deployments.

Support for PARTITION BY syntax in JDBC

You can now choose the column by which the JDBC driver will partition the data, using the PARTITION BY <column name> syntax. Here's an example:
CREATE TABLE USERS(SSN INT, FIRST_NAME VARCHAR(32), LAST_NAME VARCHAR(32)) PARTITION BY SSN.

Milestone 3 (released August 11, 2010)

Generate system dump support in Web UI

This capability enables you to generate a system wide dump from the Web UI (in addition to the ability to do so from the classic UI and the Administration API).

GigaSpaces agent shutdown API

The admin API now includes an option to gracefully shutdown the gs-agent component. This is useful for scripting purposes and provides the ability to take down the entire cluster, including the agents, without using any interfaces external to this API (such as shell commands for example).

Milestones 1-2 (Milestone 2 Released July 21, 2010)

NAT support

The GigaSpaces runtime (service grid and spaces) now support NAT by allowing the user to provide a mapping between external and internal addresses. Please refer to this page for more details.

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.

Upgrade Spring to 3.0.3 and Jetty 7.0.4

Milestone includes the latest versions of Spring and Jetty.

Column Alias Support for JDBC

As part of laying the ground for the JPA support planned for 8.0, we will improve certain aspects of our JDBC API. The first improvement is support for column aliases, e.g. "SELECT username AS un FROM users WHERE id='12345'"

GSM Dump

The dump functionality now also generates a status report for the GSMs in the system, which includes the processing units and GSCs that they manage and the status of each deployed processing unit.