blog.atomikos.com

Maybe you have noticed: we have recently changed our developer access formula - based on customer feedback. Whereas the ‘old’ formula used to be ticket-based and expired after 1 month, the new developer access is as follows:

• There is no limit on the number of issues
• Expiry is after either 3 or 6 months (your choice) - which gives you plenty of time to experiment
• There is, however, a limit of 1 named contact at the side of the customer

Again, this is based on input we got from several customers and prospects. Thanks for your feedback!

PS yes, the old formula has been discontinued: we too experienced problems with the issue limit…

When implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA), there is always the choice between components (included modules of reusable functionality) versus services (deployed once, reused by calls over the network).

How do you know which one to choose? There is a lot of things to consider, but these will give you a head-start:

• if there is a need for different configuration parameters per consumer, favor a component
• if performance of remote network calls is problematic, favor a component
• if deploy-once is crucial, favor a service
• if you have no control over the deployment parameters, favor a service (e.g., if the provider is a third party)
• to dynamically switch between both, choose service component architecture (SCA)

Also, keep in mind that components require setting up the required infrastructure (database schema, queues, etc) for each deployment.

Probably most readers of this blog post will know about components, because you probably use TransactionsEssentials as a component

We’ve uploaded a slideshare presentation on developing transactional applications with Spring. Enjoy!

Here is another excellent article about the cost of application servers, and why a paradigm shift is needed with lighter-weight alternatives:

http://www.tomcatexpert.com/blog/2010/06/03/migrating-jee-applications-tomcat-motivation-migrating

Interesting note: the author used to work at Bea, so he definitely knows what he is talking about;-)

Check out http://www.tomcatexpert.com/blog/2010/07/07/how-migrate-jee-applications-tomcat for a nice discussion on how to migrate from jee to a light-weight alternative like Tomcat - with Atomikos for JTA if needed.

Of course, you can also use Jetty from Webtide (which has Atomikos pre-integrated into the Hightide edition)…

Check out this cool blog entry on how this can all work together.

DISCLAIMER: the suggested solution has not yet been verified by Atomikos…

The cloud phenomenon is an interesting one, and a natural evolution of the outsourcing model. While a lot is going on around cloud computing itself, little is being said about reliability.

Do clouds offer reliability? In a way yes: caching systems like Terracotta, Gemstone or Oracle’s Coherence offer a fail-safe mode for availability of your data in the form of caches. So if a cloud node goes down, chances are that a live copy of the data still exists somewhere else, which means that your process can continue working elsewhere.

All is fine (or mostly fine) if you are working with a single database and are processing, say, web requests in the cache. After all, if you only have one database and no other resources then you don’t even need something like a transaction manager (or Atomikos, for that matter). There are at least two situations where things change:

• If you queue cache updates to enable write-behind, then you find yourself in a queuing scenario and are processing jobs from a queue to a database. Enter distributed transactions.
• If you are not processing web requests but rather get queued requests from the start. Enter distributed transactions.

In both cases you should at least consider using a transaction manager. In both cases, Atomikos is a good choice for the following reasons:

• It’s open source (or at least our basic version is)
• It’s very light-weight and easy to deploy (meaning it lends itself easily to cloud-oriented virtualized configurations)
• It bundles over 10 years of experience and market leadership
• It provides full crash recovery and all other bells and whistles - unlike many of the built-in solutions that you will find in a cache

So in that way, Atomikos provides “reliability for the cloud”.