1.4 Change History

1.4.1  CloudTran Version 1.4.1, June 2011

1. Upgrade GigaSpace version to 8.0.2.
2. Introduction of the commitToCohortsBeforeTxManagerCommitReturns flag to control the transaction manager commit sequence.

1.4.2  CloudTran Version 1.4.0, May 2011

1. RESTful Web services. Modelled services can optionally be exposed as a RESTful service, in addition to the standard proxies available via the data grid. The RESTful service feature is enabled by ticking a checkbox in the model.
2. Rackspace support and deployment using Whirr and JClouds.

1.4.3  CloudTran Version 1.3.0, February 2011

1. GoGrid support and deployment using JClouds.
2. SaaS (Software as a Service) capability. Allows applications to be built that support multi-tenancy. This includes a worked example with a web front-end using an embedded Jetty webserver.
3. Added security using Spring Security v3.0.5. This includes a mechanism to support multi-tenancy applications built with CloudTran.
4. Altered dataSource configuration from modelled to configuration file based. Configuration of datasources can now be defined by configuration files. This is particularly useful for SaaS multi-tenancy applications but can be used whenever the application's persistence layer is spread over more than one datasource. The granularity of the configuration is at the Entity level. The modelled datasource configuration is still available but a default configuration file is generated from the modelled datasources.
5. Messaging has been extended, incorporating the ability to use Amazon SQS. with Mule. A Mule example has been added, showing how to set up and include messaging in your application, incorporating an embedded Mule instance
6. Optimistic Locking (version control) is now ON by default.
7. Amendments to the ORM:
   • Changes for Version Control - Reads are now by default READ_COMMITTED
   • Added non-transactional reads
   • Changes to handle the security context - part of the security implementation
   • Bug fix. Previously all entries in entity tree were being updated even when they had not changed. Now only entries that have changed are updated.

1.4.4  CloudTran Version 1.22, November 2010

1.4.5  CloudTran Version 1.21, October 2010

1.4.6  CloudTran Version 1.20, October 2010

The major items are:

1. Compression and 'box-carring' (aggregating multiple logical requests into one physical request) of all inter-node requests. This reduces the total number of IOs in virtualized environments, which have higher overheads than physical IOs.
2. Compression of the information written to the transaction logger. This covers both CloudTran internal classes and generated classes.
3. Tuning of the logger via JMX beans and their properties. Reduces the latency incurred from "log before commit" typically by 2/3 (e.g. from 12ms to 4ms).
4. Additional JMX beans for all other tunable areas of CloudTran.
5. Non-memory-resident objects. These are records of transactions that do not need to be stored in the in-memory data grid. They are marked in the model with an entity property of "Persistence Style" == inPersistentStoreOnly. These transactions are then sent directly to the database. They must then be managed and monitored by a non-CloudTran application.
6. Performance optimisation of the CloudTran ORM to avoid unnecessary inter-node calls, replacing them by direct object calls.
7. Optimization of multi-data source persistence.

1.4.7  CloudTran Version 1.1, July 2010

The major items are:

1. Additions to the manual for ORM operation, log and replay scenarios, Javadocs and configuration properties.
2. Enhancements to the configuration generation.
3. Simplified deployment. The zone concept has been retired, replaced by a simple specification language expressing requirements for deployment.
4. Addition of Management and MonitoringFaster and simpler tuning using JMX beans to monitor and control the application. Using this, you can change parameters (e.g. thread count, queue length) at run time and monitor the result in graphs of the result counts. This makes tuning of a configuration dramatically simpler.

1.4.8  CloudTran Version 1.0, January 2010

There are occasional references to 'GigaSystemBuilder' in the product and documentation.

1.4.9  GigaSystemBuilder Version 2.1.x, May 2009

The main amendments of this version provide support for Unix, both for development and as a deployment environment.

1. Support for Unix users
   • The Eclipse plugin has been tested on Ubuntu 9.0.4.
   • Fixes to Eclipse plugin to support Unix style directories in the GigaSystemBuilder preferences.
   • GigaSystemBuilder now supports the Unix deployment target in the DeploymentOption.
   • Fixes to allow code generation within Unix environment.
2. New scripts generated to support Unix deployments.
   • startGSC.sh script to start the appropriate number of GSCs.
   • startGSC.sh script to start the GSM.
   • "deployApp.sh" script to copy and deploy the appropriate jars to the GigaSpaces environment.
   • "deployApp.sh shutdown" - shutdown sub-command of deployApp script, to kill all the previously started GigaSpaces processes.

1.4.10  GigaSystemBuilder Version 2.1.0, April 2009

• Updated GigaSystemBuilder tutorial and images.
• Small changes to documentation.
• Minor fixes to examples.

1.4.11  GigaSystemBuilder Version 2.0, March 2009

The main theme of this version is to support larger applications of GigaSpaces, with more services and PUs, interrelated initialisation, and automation of various deployments.

1. Support for building services
   • Service method attributes to define (a) routing styles and (b) single- or multi-processing.
   • Space-based Collections - SpaceHashMap and SpaceDelayQueue - which provide Java collections that are automatically backed up by being written to a space.
   • First-class objects for modelling message handling - subscriber, receiver and browser.
   • Support for coordinated application start-up across bean init-methods, PU and space start-up, PU initialisation calls and pulses (timed triggers). The inter-PU initialisation calls are modelled using Spring beans scripting. This allows for interdependent beans to start up in a coordinate fashion.
2. Support for building applications
   • A new start wrapper around the Client's implementation, to automatically delay the implementation during startup
   • A modelled 'pulse' object to support test feeders and periodic health checks.
3. Core Foundation framework services
   • A common library for proxies to spaces and services that avoids the dependencies of pu.xml deployment.
   • A Utilities library class.
   • Generation of a foundation Processing Unit (PU) that handles startup of interdependent services and processing units
   • A key generation service, which provides a consistent primary-key generation function for the grid, and also demonstrates the use of the other infrastructure features in version 2 of GigaSystemsBuilder.
4. Deployment
   • Named deployments, with different numbers of PUs, backups, types of machine etc. in the different deployments.
   • Specification of depoyments for the whole application, but with overrides for specific Processing Units
   • Deployment to Cloud and Windows CLI (Command-Line Interface). IDE-style debugging is support with deployment to Eclipse. (This feature was in Version 1.)