users@glassfish.java.net

Introducing Project Shoal - a pluggable dynamic clustering framework

From: Shreedhar Ganapathy <Shreedhar.Ganapathy_at_Sun.COM>
Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:51:26 -0800

Hello folks
We are happy to inform you of the beginnings of Project Shoal
<https://shoal.dev.java.net>, a GlassFish community project, and another
Sun Microsystems contribution to the open source world.

Project Shoal is the culmination of an early dream and a very unique
collaboration between the JXTA community and GlassFish community that
was achieved through both technical contributions and critical
management support.

Project Shoal offers a pluggable dynamic clustering framework that
allows a product to be clustered at runtime. Processes join a predefined
group and communicate through simple APIs, be notified of group events,
and leave the complexity of group and member discovery, network
addressing, and protocols to the Group Management Service core of Shoal.

Shoal will be inside the guts of GlassFish v2 providing the requisite
Group Management Infrastructure for value added features such as
Automatic Delegated Transaction Recovery, Cluster Health Monitoring,
IIOP Failover Load Balancer, Timer Migrations, In-Memory Replication, etc.

The use of the framework is not restricted to the Application Server and
can be used as such as the foundation for a grid deployment, or
deployment of a highly available service, etc. In fact its usage in
various situations as a solution is only limited by imagination. :)

Here are some blog references that gives some insights into our past
work that has led to fruition in the form of this new contribution from
Sun Microsystems to the open source community. Be sure to visit the
project website as well (https://shoal.dev.java.net)

*Blog
<http://weblogs.java.net/blog/hamada/archive/2006/11/dynamic_cluster.html>*by
Mohamed Abdelaziz (JXTA)
*Blog <http://blogs.sun.com/tra/entry/glassfish_%2B_jxta_%3D_shoal>*by
Bernard Traversat (JXTA)
*Blog <http://blogs.sun.com/MortazaviBlog/date/20061108>*by Masood (Max)
Mortazavi (Java DB)
*Blog
<http://blogs.sun.com/shreedhar/entry/project_shoal_graduates_with_source>*by
Shreedhar Ganapathy (GlassFish)

Happy Clustering !

Best regards on behalf of the Shoal team

Shreedhar Ganapathy