GigaSpaces Previews XAP for Cloud, Data Grid 
GigaSpaces Technologies is showing a “preview version” of its soon-to-be released eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) enterprise-grade application server for distributed applications. XAP 7.1 will sport new features tuned for cloud and data grids, and is due to ship Q1 2010.
GigaSpaces Technologies is showing a “preview version” of its upcoming eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) enterprise-grade application server for deploying and scaling distributed applications. XAP 7.1, specially architected for cloud and data grid applications, is due to ship in Q1 2010, company officials said.
“With [XAP] 7.1, enterprises benefit from a distributed environment that allows dynamic scaling and multiple applications to share the same resources, improving IT efficiency and cost savings,” Guy Korland, head of GigaSpaces’ R&D, said in a statement. “[D]evelopers and administrators who use XAP, so they will most benefit from the improved usability and enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities.”
Korlad described XAP as a “build once, run anywhere” middleware platform, designed to support a full application stack as a single, end-to-end solution. XAP 7.1 can be used in public and private clouds, data centers, and virtualized environments, simultaneously or independently, without changing a single code, he added.
Specifically, XAP 7.1 will include “elastic data grid capabilities,” to let users instantiate a data grid with a single API call. The upgrade will also sport improved querying, troubleshooting capabilities, and optimized performance for transactional operations.
Other XAP 7.1 features will include:
- Support for multi-tenant environments and dynamic scaling of the data grid capacity in both internal data centers and cloud environments.
- On-demand distributed dump and log gathering to generate “complete snapshots” of the state of the system on demand.
- Easier and expanded troubleshooting and monitoring for large clusters.
- Native support in UI for logs view. (See screenshot image) .
Inside GigaSpaces’ Support for Cloud, Data Grid
GigaSpaces’ Service Virtualization Framework leverages a Space-Based Architecture (SBA), which is a software architecture pattern for achieving linear scalability of stateful, high-performance applications.
According to Wikipedia, SBA follows principles of SOA, REST (Representational State Transfer), EDA (Event-driven architecture) and even grid computing. “With a space-based architecture, applications are built out of a set of self-sufficient units, known as processing-units (PU). These units are independent of each other, so that the application can scale by adding more units,” Wikipedia added.
Further, GigaSpaces’ XAP architecture is built from these sub-systems:
- An SLA-Driven Container for virtualization capabilities
- Unified Clustering Layer responsible for a single clustering model across all the product's functionality. This is built on top of the space infrastructure
- Core Middleware, which are space-based runtime services which provide data, messaging and processing implementation
- Lightweight Application Containers to house services that provide runtime support for applications
- OpenSpaces - API and Components , which are the API layer and a component model (building blocks) for application devs
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