7.0 XAP.NET GA will provide a new powerful capability, known as space tasks.
A space task is a custom user code representing a logical task that is executed at the space behind the proxy and returns its result to the invoker. The task also receives an embedded proxy to the node it runs within once executed, and it can take advantage of it to execute space operation which is part of its logic in embedded fashion. It can be routed to a specific node using a routing value or executed as a distributed task on the cluster in parallel later to be reduced to a single result when the results from the parallel distributed execution arrives, this pattern is also known as the Map Reduce which is commonly used by many distributed systems such as Google, Microsoft and more .
This feature gives a lot of power to the user. For instance, a search engine can take advantage of the map reduce pattern and more other applications that can take advantage of parallel processing. Another usage would be executing very complex custom queries in an optimized fashion. Doing it by executing it locally at each space node with a distributed space task, and only send the relevant result back to the client from each node, doing so reduce the network overhead and the calculation over head the client would have needed to calculate at the entire potential result set if it would have used a different conventional method.
This feature is known as the executor service in the Java product counterpart.
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