As professional open source developers we have chosen to use free JBoss products as the underlying building blocks of our architecture. The active developer team has made us convinced that the software is and will be frequently updated to respond the community needs. While the whole software suite is well covered under their community pages, we tell here how we have personally benefited from the JBoss offering.
Clustering functionality has been essential feature in our software designed for the needs of scientific computing. The architectures we design and develop have to scale to serve the demanding needs of a very special user group. While the demand for resources is often overwhelming the research funding may not allow purchasing high-end devices for computing and storage. Thus, we decided to develop software that can aggregate large number of commodity devices to form powerful entities. To create infrastructures where multiple devices join group entities the JGroups reliable group communication suite has been a valuable aid.
JBoss Innovation Awards is an innovation competition where developers using company’s open source components can submit description of their novel work. By getting a honorable mention in the competition we have gained valuable credibility to our work. The acknowledgement from a global player has been a true icebreaker in our efforts to transfer technology from academia to industry.
We have used JBoss Cache to implement an information system for our distributed storage. By calling the cache functions thorough AOP interfaces our application code remains nearly unchanged. With only minor configuration our architecture can benefit from scalable and redundant information object storage that provides complex functionalities such as transactions, security, and caching.