Clustering with Spring - best practices?

[Patrick Angeles]

What's the best way to implement a distributed, clustered Java application using Spring? (Without using EJBs...)

Does anyone have a good success story to share?


Thanks

[isyak]

Can try terracotta for Spring.
http://www.terracotta.org/

[Patrick Angeles]

From searching the web and these forums, there looks to be a few ways to do clustering:

1. Tangosol Coherence
2. Terracotta
3. Cluster4Spring
4. Homebrew lookup service using a distributed cache

Coherence is commercial, and probably requires a large time (and $$$) commitment to properly evaluate.

Terracotta has a lot of buzz, but I'd like to hear from people who've actually used it successfully in production.

Cluster4Spring I've only seen recently... not sure how viable it is.

And the homebrew option, while feasible, is hack-y... (why doesn't Spring support something like this out of the box?)

Thanks,

[nekoval]

First of all, why do you want to distribute and cluster your application?
I know that "clustering" sounds cool, but what exactly do you plan to cluster?

E.g. if you want to cluster your Web load, you will be happy with Tomcat/Resin, they both support session clustering.

[Patrick Angeles]

I'm not talking about clustering HttpSessions.

For example, I'd like to have an 3-tier architecture, with separate (Java-based) web-tier and services-tier. Both tiers should be clustered for failover and load balancing. In the web-tier, you're right, I can use HttpSession clustering. But what is the Spring way of clustering the services tier?

[sinnus]

What is a clustering in your mind?

[Colin Yates]

What exactly are you trying to cluster in the middle (services) tier?

Typically all Spring beans are stateless singletons, or at least thread safe singletons, so there is very little value clustering them.

Maybe a concrete use case would be useful....

[Patrick Angeles]

Sorry, should have been clearer. I meant cluster in the same sense that you would cluster Stateless EJBs. There is no bean state to replicate, but you have load balancing and client-failover across multiple nodes.

[sinnus]

Sorry, should have been clearer. I meant cluster in the same sense that you would cluster Stateless EJBs. There is no bean state to replicate, but you have load balancing and client-failover across multiple nodes.

If you use only a web-container the web server (tomcat, resin, etc) cares about load balancing. If you use EJB container it cares about load balancing. Where are you using spring?

[gregturn]

Checkout: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/j...31-spring.html

Spring makes this solution so easy and non-invasive. It is easy to replace the author's JBoss cache with ehCache or Terracotta, without changing your service pojos.