experience with java clustering ?

Question

Would like to hear from people about their experience with java clustering (ie. implementing HA solutions). aka . terracotta, jgroups etc. It doesn't have to be web apps. Experience writing custom stand alone servers would be great also.

UPDATE - I will be a bit more specific -> not that interested in Web App clustering (unless it can be pulled out and run standalone). I know it works. But we need a bit more than just session clustering. Examining solutions in terms of ease of programing, supported topologies (ie. single data center versus over the WAN ), number of supported nodes. Issues faced, work arounds. At the moment I am doing some POC (Proof of concept) work on Terracotta and JGroups to see if its worth the effort for our app (which is stand alone, outside of a web container).

Answer 1

Jboss clustering was very easy to get up and running.

It seems to work well for us.

Answer 2

Thanks, but was after more non-web app based clustering ie. stand alone apps. I am in an eval period at the moment. Will have a look a jboss. Are they pure jboss app server ? has anyone had any experience using the clustering tech outside of the server ? I haven't used JBoss. What we don't want is using a database for updates. So, I don't think its a simple question. We are looking a 100's to 1000's of Finite state machines that are updated from from multiple users, and then distributing both the FSM state and potentially processing of the FSM state across the cluster. At the moment we are single machine in the impl. So real war stories on what people have experienced would help a lot. I have seen some some solutions in telecom apps go split brain due to wan issues, and have seen various degrees of recovering when the WAN reconverges/recovers.

Answer 3

You might want to take a look at Hazelcast. It is super lite, easy and free clustering platform with cluster API. If you are clustering your application state/data, Hazelcast can be great help with its distributed/partitioned, queue, map, set, list and lock implementations.

Regards,

-talip

http://www.hazelcast.com

Answer 4

JBossCache is a standalone open source project that JbossClustering makes use of in the Application Server.

Our company made use of it in our own custom network server, its working well so far in development, though yet to be deployed.

Its a pretty simple API, and it comes in two flavors, a flat cache, or a "POJO Cache" that uses insturmentation to keep State across servers. Basically, updates to fields are propgated across the network using JGroups.

Answer 5

You may look at Oracle Coherence (formerly Tangosole Coherence).
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/coherence/coherencedatagrid/coherence_solutions.html

Answer 6

I saw a demonstration of GridGain at our local JUG and I was very impressed. The documentation is very complete and it's very easy to get it going. I haven't started using it yet, so I can't quite say that it's working for us.

http://www.gridgain.com/