CloudTran overview

CloudTran is an infrastructure layer for developing scalable data-oriented (OLTP) applications in Java, combined with a design & development environment based on Eclipse. There are three layers you can use:

  • Cloud Transaction Management

    This is a new style of transaction management that works on the cloud - or a distributed grid. This is necessary because "distributed transactions" are slow and unreliable in practice.
    • CloudTran can commit to backed-up memory, making it extremely fast (many thousand TPS per coordinator node).
    • It also coordinates data in the the processing nodes with data in storage services; the process has strong ACID properties over both tiers.
    • This transaction approach covers relational data, non-relational data and other non-persistent actions, like messages - they can all be included in a cloud transaction.

  • Data Mapping

    There are three different representations of data in CloudTran:
    • The entity/object view. This is the ORM view - a tree of objects in memory, with related objects referenced by get() methods.
    • The in-grid view. This is a single 'row' view, with related objects indirectly referenced by foreign key values. Related rows may be on different nodes in the grid.
    • The storage view. For databases, this is the row view. JDBC transforms to map between grid and storage are built-in. Non-SQL persistent views can be addressed by plug-ins.
    CloudTran automates the transformation between these representations; the infrastructure manages the data movement.

  • Architecture, Development and Deployment

    CloudTran provides an out-of-the-box application architecture for mid-tier processing and data backends.

    A simple Eclipse plugin provides application modelling and framework generation, application code development and unit testing.

    Typically each application will be deployed to a number of environments with a range of configurations, for testing and production. Deployments can be defined alongside the application definition and CloudTran will generate the deployment scripts.

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