Bondolo just announced that the GlassFish Grizzly HTTP Engine will replace the Jetty HTTP engine in the JXTA SE Binding. Bondolo expects "considerable reduction in the resources used by peers which accept incoming HTTP connections and probably a modest throughput improvement".

JXTA defines and implements a set of open protocols for peer-to-peer communication, GlassFish uses it in its Shoal Clustering Framework. Grizzly is the Java NIO framework used in the GlassFish AppServer and elsewhere.

Thanks to Bernard for the tip.

A Shoal Project Update from Mohamed reports that the team is currently working on: • Enabling multi cluster support • Enabling cross sub-net and cross firewall deployment • Solidifying lightweight cluster multicast These new features are intended for GlassFish v2UR1 and v2.1. Check Mohamed's Overview and New Features for more details.

Shreedhar is beginning to document how Shoal works and has just written a Shoal 101. Shoal is the Group Management Service (GMS) used in GlassFish but it can also be used independently. The writeup includes a Sample Example that shows how to register for group events, join a pre-defined group, get notifications of group events, send/receive messages, and leave the group.

Artima has a feature entry on Project Shoal which just reached 1.0 Early Access. Project Shoal is a Group Management System heavily used in GlassFish v2 but it can also be used in other contexts. The JXTA implementation used by default and which brings close-to-zero clustering configuration in GlassFish can also be replaced (by JGroups for instance) using the appropriate SPIs.

One of the reasons for the GlassFish v2 delay was the time needed to make sure we could go through as many customer scenarios as possible, specifically in the clustering area. Shreedhar reports on the 8-node GlassFish clustering quality tests which led to improved quality of Shoal itself. This and future use of Shoal in SailFin (the SIP supported application server based on GlassFish with Ericsson as a major contributor) shows the greater GlassFish Community at work.

The code for Shoal is now available. Shoal is a generic Dynamic Clustering framework (Overview) that is being used in GlassFish V2 but, like Grizzly and others, can be used independently. Shoal includes a client API and an SPI to plug-in different implementations. The project has been a collaboration with the JXTA team and the default implementation takes very good advantage of the features of JXTA to provide a highly-decentralized and highly scalable implementation.

Read Shreedhar's intro to the project and Mohamed's detailed description of its use of JXTA. In separate entries, Max and Bernard provide context and background on the project. An excellent addition to the GlassFish Community.

Shoal will be integrated in the next GlassFish v2 milestone, together with Larry's in-Memory Replication machinery.